From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Jun 11 17:46:39 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id RAA16424 for freebsd-hackers-outgoing; Thu, 11 Jun 1998 17:46:39 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from smtp04.primenet.com (daemon@smtp04.primenet.com [206.165.6.134]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id RAA15450 for ; Thu, 11 Jun 1998 17:43:35 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from tlambert@usr09.primenet.com) Received: (from daemon@localhost) by smtp04.primenet.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) id RAA27580; Thu, 11 Jun 1998 17:43:28 -0700 (MST) Received: from usr09.primenet.com(206.165.6.209) via SMTP by smtp04.primenet.com, id smtpd027507; Thu Jun 11 17:43:18 1998 Received: (from tlambert@localhost) by usr09.primenet.com (8.8.5/8.8.5) id RAA04594; Thu, 11 Jun 1998 17:43:00 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199806120043.RAA04594@usr09.primenet.com> Subject: Re: internationalization To: mike@smith.net.au (Mike Smith) Date: Fri, 12 Jun 1998 00:42:55 +0000 (GMT) Cc: tlambert@primenet.com, mike@smith.net.au, itojun@iijlab.net, joy@urc.ac.ru, kline@tao.thought.org, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG In-Reply-To: <199806112245.PAA01221@dingo.cdrom.com> from "Mike Smith" at Jun 11, 98 03:45:36 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL25] 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 > > > This is clearly fallacious, as evidenced by Ito-san's earlier message. > > > It is not uncommon for the ordinary asiatic citizen to want to use > > > several locale's glyph sets in a single context. > > > > They can use a markup language to select fonts. Naturally, I'd prefer > > the language be SGML rather than ISO 2022. > > If you're advocating the use of a markup language, ie. forcing the issue > into the application domain, then you're buying out of the entire issue > by suggesting that it's not required in the system domain. > > Not that I necessarily disagree, just that you're effectively moving > the language/character set bigotry line rather than doing away with it. Yes. That's quite true. It is my contention that the vast majority of uses of a computer system will occur in a single locale. I'm moving the line so that the task before us is internationalization, not multinationalization. For a multi-language word processor, which is what would be used to create the "Japanese Chinese Restraunt Menu", the onus is on the word processor to do the multilingual support (the person making up the menu falls into the category "translator", by the way). This means that the word processor application author, not the system library author, is responsible for the multinationalization code, and it means that the word processing applciation, not every application needing localization but not multinationalization, bears the compute intensive burden of running the multinationalization code. This removes the onus to support the input/output processing overhead from other application programs. Like "/bin/cat", for example. PS: There is a TeX extension for multilingual word processing, using Unicode available; the URL is http://www.ens.fr/omega/ It supports English, French, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, etc.; in other words, everything Unicode supports. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message