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Date:      Wed, 12 Mar 1997 09:15:19 -0500 (EST)
From:      John Fieber <jfieber@indiana.edu>
To:        =?KOI8-R?B?4c7E0sXKIP7F0s7P1w==?= <ache@nagual.ru>
Cc:        Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>, pam@polynet.lviv.ua, hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Q: Locale - is it possible to change on the fly?
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.3.95q.970312083424.26807J-100000@fallout.campusview.indiana.edu>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.95q.970312114807.674B-100000@nagual.ru>

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On Wed, 12 Mar 1997, [KOI8-R] Андрей Чернов wrote:

> On Tue, 11 Mar 1997, John Fieber wrote:
> > The Unicode 2.0 standard explicitly states multilingual computing
> > as the primary goal of the development effort. (First sentence in
> > section 1.1: Design Goals.)
> 
> The problem with Unicode is that symbols are just symbols, so you can't do
> spell check on Unicode multilingual text. I.e. imagine mixed

Ah, but does the standard or the consortium make the claim that
they will solves *all* your multilingual computing problems?  No. 
If you read the rest of my message, you will find I mentioned the
necessity of language tagging for some things.  This has been
considered for the standard but for a variety of reasons,
including the inefficency of: 

> It means that each symbol must have language tag additionly.

it is more appropriately handled with a higher level protocol. 
Another is the blurry and shifting lines between languages.  At
what point does a dialect deserve its own language code?  The
policital difficulties of providing a unified symbol space are
big enough on their own.

The language issue aside, my point was that Unicode makes
significant headway in the arena of multilingual computing, which
I believe to be more common than Terry suggested, thanks largely
to the growing echange of electronic texts on the Internet. For
something very simple, should people be restricted to an ASCII
rendition of their name when signing an email message? 

-john




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