From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Jun 11 15:24:30 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id PAA15679 for freebsd-hackers-outgoing; Thu, 11 Jun 1998 15:24:30 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from gershwin.tera.com (gershwin.tera.com [207.224.230.28]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id PAA15640 for ; Thu, 11 Jun 1998 15:24:19 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from kline@tao.thought.org) Received: from tao.thought.org (tao.tera.com [207.108.223.55]) by gershwin.tera.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id PAA19972; Thu, 11 Jun 1998 15:23:36 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from kline@localhost) by tao.thought.org (8.8.8/8.7.3) id PAA12719; Thu, 11 Jun 1998 15:23:22 -0700 (PDT) From: Gary Kline Message-Id: <199806112223.PAA12719@tao.thought.org> Subject: Re: internationalization In-Reply-To: <357F7060.2B5BBC16@urc.ac.ru> from Konstantin Chuguev at "Jun 11, 98 11:51:28 am" To: joy@urc.ac.ru (Konstantin Chuguev) Date: Thu, 11 Jun 1998 15:23:22 -0700 (PDT) Cc: tlambert@primenet.com, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Organization: <> thought.org: public access uNix in service... <> X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL32 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG According to Konstantin Chuguev: [Charset koi8-r unsupported, filtering to ASCII...] > Gary Kline wrote: > > > > ? I would prefer going to a full-on Unicode implementation to support > > ? all known human languages. > > ? > > > > This was my first leaning, but I'm increasingly > > going toward the ISO families. > > > What do you mean by ISO families? ISO 8859? ISO 2022? ISO 10646? > Which of them? I meant whatever representation of the International Standards Org that would translate *.msg files into *.cat catalogues that can be sent to stdout|stderr using the generic locate mechanisms. For the Latinate languages, iso-8859-[12]. If the iso-2022 model works for the Asian languages, then that, too. I've seen iso-10646 referenced but do not understand much about it... > > > ? The next hardest step is the editors, starting with "vi". They have > > ? to be able to support Unicode. > > > > > > nvi/nex already have been tweaked for 8-bit international > > support. I learned this accidently. WAs quite > > surprised to see messages in French and German. :-) > > > It's not internationalization. It's just localization. And generally, > it's much easier to be done. > All right. Then my first concern is localization. Any shell or other utility should be understandable by people in their own society. > > Nonetheless, I see why you like the Unicode solution. > > Someone said, ``Well, French support is great, but how > > are you going to handle Japanese?'' > > > And how are you going to handle both (+ Russian, for example :-) Russian? Dunno. I've seen the KOI8-R character set; I have several cyrillic fonts in my X11 library, but know absolutely nothing about how this would work with my catalog code. Since Russian should fit into an 8-bit byte, I'm hoping that the KOI8-R set would fit. > This certainly requires either one flat character set like ISO 10646 > (at least its Plane 0) or ESC-switched one like ISO 2022. > > > ? > > > > How does the ISO2022 model work here? Isn't it the > > same for Japanese and Chinese? > > ISO 2022 is just a mechanism of containing a number of subsets > in one character set (switching between subsets with predefined > ESC-sequences). Ah. It's getting a bit clearer now. In an earlier mail message you mentioned that with Unicode collation (and possibly more) was easier. Doesn't the locale code take care of these issues (assuming the ISO method)? I'm not so radically ambitious as to suggest solving the entire i18n issue. That could take a few centuries, :-) I'm looking for a way to implement messaging; and later, as much of the rest of ``locale'' as I can. gary > > -- > Konstantin V. Chuguev. System administrator of Southern > http://www.urc.ac.ru/~joy/ Ural Regional Center of FREEnet, > mailto:joy@urc.ac.ru Chelyabinsk, Russia. > -- Gary D. Kline kline@tao.thought.org Public service uNix To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message