Look at both sides of the matter

Author: Erzi Congzhou

"The saying that Principal Zhao and Teacher Xu have heard is that Western characters only require twenty-six letters, plus numbers and some symbols, to form an ASCII collection that can meet the basic needs of information systems, and build on it

A distributed keyboard with just over 200 characters can already meet the basic needs of Western information systems."

"As for our Chinese characters, the most commonly used character sets are more than 5,000, so the Chinese character system is far less simple than the West. In the information age, it will be ruthlessly eliminated due to factors such as complex input and output and too large character libraries."

"But these people are just frogs in the well."

"They just saw these disadvantages and without thinking carefully, they took it for granted and came to the wrong conclusion."

"They have never considered that so many hieroglyphics are actually huge intangible cultural wealth unique to our nation."

"Many people are talking about computer technology now. In fact, this term is not accurate. To be precise, it should be called information technology, and what we are experiencing now is an information technology revolution."

"Then what is information technology?" Zhou Zhi smiled and said: "In the final analysis, it is information-related technology, including information input, storage, processing, and output."

"An independent unit with these capabilities is called an information unit."

"And countless such units are interconnected to form a huge information network."

"In fact, each of us can be regarded as an information unit, and our society is an information network."

"If we understand it from this perspective, which nation has the most advanced information technology in history? There is no doubt that it is the Chinese nation. Because our thousands of years of history have been very well recorded through writing and language."

"As a carrier of information, which language can withstand the test for the longest time? There is no doubt that it is Chinese characters, which have been using the same structure and application system since the oracle bone inscriptions until now."

"What does this mean? It shows that our nation's Chinese character system can withstand the test of time and is a fairly advanced and mature information system."

"So the information age will not only not be our disaster, on the contrary, it will be our huge opportunity."

"Any information has a concept of information volume, which is to use the shortest byte unit to express the richest and most accurate meaning."

"Which language has the largest unit information capacity? There is no doubt that it is still Chinese."

"The veterans of the Unicode Organization and Microsoft are very knowledgeable people. They know this concept, so they are very enthusiastic about seeking cooperation with us."

"Everything has two sides. The problem with Chinese characters is that there are many characters and it is difficult to master. The advantage of Chinese characters is that once mastered, they are simple to express, have a large amount of information, and are efficient to use."

"So when we look at a problem, we can't just look at the disadvantages and ignore the advantages."

"We have to admit that in terms of programming and mathematical foundations, Western alphabetic script has its unique advantages. However, at the advanced application level, the advantages of the Chinese character system are highlighted."

"What makes everyone lose confidence is mainly the current difficulty in inputting and outputting Chinese characters in the information system, and the fact that the font library takes up too much space, resulting in a shortage of information system resources."

"The biggest difference between us and those who are disdainful of Chinese characters is that they think this problem is unsolvable, while we think this problem is completely solvable."

"First of all, there is the issue of font libraries. It is true that font libraries require large space, but we also need to see the rapid development of information technology."

"The capacity of today's storage devices is growing exponentially over time. Soon we will see the emergence of storage devices with more than ten G, tens of hundreds of G, or even thousands of G."

"By that time, the space occupied by the font library can only be described as insignificant."

"Next is the issue of input and output. Output is very simple. Whether it is a monitor or a printer, as long as you give it the correct instructions, text output processing is no more complicated than images."

"The key is input, and the difficulty of input can actually be understood if we think about it carefully. This is caused by our insistence on using the traditional ASCII distributed keyboard for Chinese character output."

"What if we change the way, for example, if audio reading technology matures one day, can we abandon the traditional keyboard and use voice to input Chinese characters? By then, the word association function of Chinese characters will become a major advantage of our input.

.”

"Even if we don't talk about such advanced methods, even if we use traditional keyboards, we have now come up with an extremely fast input method, which is the root input method represented by Wangma."

"The fastest typist can type nearly two hundred words per minute, which is close to our normal speaking speed."

"We can even conclude that the current situation is: through the root input method, you can already get an input speed that is no less than speaking, and because it is input through radicals in special positions, there is no unknown word that you don't recognize.

Questions that will be entered.”

"The future situation is: after the input method of the information system evolves to voice, and the use of the information system evolves to the competitive application layer, the unique advantages of the Chinese character system will be greatly exerted."

"At that time, we will find that software that uses Chinese to communicate and transmit information will have far greater vitality than software that uses other languages."

"With this understanding, we can realize that we are now laying a solid foundation and are determined to seek an international standard protocol at the bottom of the protocol that can accommodate all our Chinese character codes and has multi-language scalability and global versatility.

existence."

"But isn't this too ambitious?" It seems that the godfather has done a lot of research this month and has been able to ask some key questions: "Don't you mean that our information industry is still in the catching-up stage? And according to our usual

The approach, the catch-up stage, is to first solve the problems that exist, and then solve the problems that are good or not, right?"

"Yes, godfather, what you said is also a routine practice." Zhou Zhi smiled and said: "Before Shu University proposed to cooperate with the alliance to develop the Unicode protocol, we did the same thing and even launched two fonts in succession.

Version."

"But there are huge engineering traps in that way of working. Once it is not fully considered, it will cause huge troubles in the future." Zhou Zhi said: "We have encountered real-life examples in this regard."

"Really? Our information technology hasn't developed for many years, has it?" Godfather asked, "Is it a problem that happened with supercomputers?"

"No," Zhou Zhi knew some inside information in this regard, and he was naturally very proud: "I just want to tell you some exciting news. Our latest generation of supercomputer has been developed, called 'Dawn', and is now in the ministry.

After acceptance, the peak computing speed will be as high as 640 million operations per second."

"This..." The godfather was a little frightened: "Didn't he just pass the national appraisal of the Galaxy All-Digital Simulation Type II Computer? Why did another dawn appear?"
Chapter completed!