From: matz@... (Yukihiro Matsumoto)
Date: 2002-05-07T03:53:59+09:00
Subject: Re: Are %q and %Q universal?

Hi,

In message "Re: Are %q and %Q universal?"
    on 02/05/07, Chris Gehlker <gehlker@fastq.com> writes:

|In looking into this a bit more, I read up on EUC and SJIS. Now here's a
|question just to satisfy my curiosity. "Did the inventor of SJIS like to
|inhale plastic adhesives?" EUC has an internal logic, as does UTF-8. SJIS
|just seems deliberately arbitrary and obscure.
|
|Probably I'm missing something because I can't write Japanese.

Historical reason.  SJIS is designed to avoid the region taken by
katakana characters.  We used to have 8bit less expressive character
set (ASCII + katakana characters).

For more information, check out "CJKV programming" (the balloon fish
book from O'Reilly).

							matz.