From owner-freebsd-hackers Wed Mar 12 06:21:16 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id GAA14109 for hackers-outgoing; Wed, 12 Mar 1997 06:21:16 -0800 (PST) Received: from fallout.campusview.indiana.edu (fallout.campusview.indiana.edu [149.159.1.1]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id GAA14104 for ; Wed, 12 Mar 1997 06:21:11 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost (jfieber@localhost) by fallout.campusview.indiana.edu (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id JAA01157; Wed, 12 Mar 1997 09:15:19 -0500 (EST) Date: Wed, 12 Mar 1997 09:15:19 -0500 (EST) From: John Fieber To: =?KOI8-R?B?4c7E0sXKIP7F0s7P1w==?= cc: Terry Lambert , pam@polynet.lviv.ua, hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Q: Locale - is it possible to change on the fly? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8BIT Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk 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