Marco Cimarosti wrote:

>Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
>
>
>>>Depends what you mean by "most," but the occasional proper name or
>>>potentially ambiguous word is hardly "most."
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>I think he meant "most Modern Hebrew texts use at least some points
>>somewhere in them." It depends how you want to look at quantities
>>of language. Viewed word-by-word, yes, very few words are
>>pointed. Viewed letter-by-letter, even fewer, proportionately.
>>Viewed sentence-by-sentence, proportionately more, and so forth.
>>Viewed document-by-document, pointing (in the sense of occasional
>>pointing) is very common.
>>
>>
>
>The designer of a character set (for computers, lead type typography,
>typewriters, etc.) would view it "user-by-user", i.e. she'd ask herself "Are
>points used at all?"
>
>For Hebrew, it seems that the answer from 8-bit character set for computer
>is ambiguous.
>
>ISO and DOS character say "no" (i.e. include no points):
>
>

I can't think of any good reasons not to have included vowel-points in
these encodings, except maybe that the early plain-text technology
didn't deal well with non-spacing marks, and exhaustively coding all
letters with all vowels is... well, excessive. It's not like they
didn't have the space in the code table, and it's not like Modern Hebrew
never uses the vowels. It feels like another case of
over-simplification on someone's part (not accusing IBM or MS here;
likely as not it was their expert input).

~mark