It's sort of hilarious that he said that, given that English speakers were able to encode every character in 7-bit ASCII. The issues around standardising characters was because non-English characters were being squabbled about between the French, Russians and a whole bunch of other non-English countries.
In essence, he's not understood that really ASCII was used as the base for Unicode because it was widely used. In fact. It's actually ISO8859-1 that has been used because of its wide coverage of a variety of languages, far more than any of the other 8859-x character sets.
I cannot speak to anything else he's said, aside from saying that trying to encode all the world's languages is bloody hard.
Even when a limited number of countries try to nut out a standard for 128 characters, it's a nightmare. And don't forget that they were competing with EBCDIC.
In essence, he's not understood that really ASCII was used as the base for Unicode because it was widely used. In fact. It's actually ISO8859-1 that has been used because of its wide coverage of a variety of languages, far more than any of the other 8859-x character sets.
I cannot speak to anything else he's said, aside from saying that trying to encode all the world's languages is bloody hard.
Even when a limited number of countries try to nut out a standard for 128 characters, it's a nightmare. And don't forget that they were competing with EBCDIC.
I wrote about it here:
http://randomtechnicalstuff.blogspot.com.au/2009/05/unicode-...