At 07:58 +0200 6/10/2002, Paul Guyot wrote:
>Date: Sun, 9 Jun 2002 08:56:21 -0700
>From: "Michael 'Mickey' Sattler" <michael_at_GeekTimes.com>
>
>>It's damned easy to explain and understand.
>
>On the contrary. There are several concepts: letters, characters,
>glyph, encodings, charsets, etc. that aren't very easy to
>distinguish, even for nerds.
It's not easy to USE, but rather easy to understand. Heck, even in
one sentence: "Early language representations - EBCDIC and ASCII -
supported only a small number of characters (think English alphabet)
and were not up to the task of supporting languages with lots of
characters (think Chinese) so Unicode was developed." That should do
it for about ninety-nine per cent of the interested population.
because some languages have lots of individual characters, more than
can fit in the early language representations, a new representation
was created."
>It's totally enough for all languages.
Au contraire. If memory serves there was a lot of grief among member
groups because the space alotted to them was not enough for their
entire character set. I just read this page
http://tronweb.super-nova.co.jp/unicoderevisited.html
and it seems that some modern tweak on this, surrogates, might have
been kludged on to fix this problem, but I didn't read far (and my
memories of this are from the early 90s)...
> >It's kind of a pain, so unless you're working on a commercial software
>>package it just isn't worth the effort.
>
>Ahem!
>
>It's not only a question of localization. Many software are useless
>to non American or people speaking European languages because they
>were poorly written by american-centric or illiterate
>english-speaking people (in English, some words normally take
>accents).
I'm not sure we're disagreeing there. I don't say that supporting
Unicode in software isn't worthwhile, only that it's a PITA. If I'm
whipping up a small something, or even a mid-sized something, it's so
much easier to use simple ASCII handling rather than doing Unicode
throughout. And that's just the I/O. Adding true localization is
another PITA, and locale-saavy internationalization is yet another
PITA.
Just not worth the effort unless it's a for-profit venture. Worthy,
but not worthwhile.
M
-- Michael "Mickey" Sattler, Geek Times <mailto:michael_at_GeekTimes.com> San Francisco, California, USA <http://www.GeekTimes.com/michael/>I was born not knowing and have had only a little time to change that here and there. -- Richard Feynman (1918 - 1988)
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