At 18:31 +0000 2001/02/14, David Carlisle wrote:
>But 8bit encodings have never been even remotely like that.
>A "natural" system designed for 8bit encodings would have some
>sensible way of mapping different input encodings.
...
>Similarly the difficulty of producing hyphenation tables that work with
>different 8bit font encodings. (Not so much the perceived difficulty of
>distributing such a thing, suitable macros could fix that, more the
>impossibility of sharing the tables at tex's inner level)

What about making a version of TeX that is 32-bit internally; then one
hooks up a preprocessor that translates files into 32-bit char's before
handing them over to TeX? -- Then base LaTeX on that one.

The thing is that it is relatively easy to get a stable version, and one
get some extra time waiting for a more advanced successor to TeX.

  Hans Aberg