Date: Fri, 12 Jun 1998 10:37:10 +0900 From: Jun-ichiro itojun Itoh <itojun@itojun.org> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> Cc: mike@smith.net.au (Mike Smith), junker@jazz.snu.ac.kr, kline@tao.thought.org, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: internationalization Message-ID: <646.897615430@coconut.itojun.org> In-Reply-To: tlambert's message of Thu, 11 Jun 1998 22:51:13 GMT. <199806112251.PAA29278@usr09.primenet.com>
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I got too many messages so I respond only to where can't resist to. >My opinions: > >I believe it is an error to use multibyte encodings, as they destroy >important information which is utilized by 8-bit alphabetic programmers >to make user interaction and data storage task drastically less complicated >than they would otherwise be. We got too much computation power already (most of the computers are just waiting for human input, as shown by the success of distributed DES challenge). It is just posible to use multibyte encoding, maybe with some help from library (runelocale for multibyte encoding). The problems are: - there are too many programs that assume character bitwidth is proportional to the width on the screen (this is also harmful for propotional font handling. GUI people already takes care of this) - there are too many programs that assume 8th bit of "char" is availble as flag bit - and more >The Japanese already have to deal with this problem because of their >failure to use the Kana (an alphabetic Japanese that fits comfortably >in 8 bits), so these problems (apparently) don't chafe them like they >chafe us. >The information density of Kanji is drastically higher, and the Japanese >will, arguably, beat the heck out of us in storage density, once they >figure out how to solve the input problem for the normally 20,000 >ideogrammatic characters known to an average Japanese with a PhD. One >of the main reasons Japan doesn't lead the world in software production >and sales right now is their reliance on Kanji. I agree that the man-months are eaten for Kanji processing in Japanese software industry, but I certanly not agree that Japanese should have been moved to Kana-only world. How do you think if you are told to move to 6-letter (yea, A to F) world just to fit letters and digits into 4bits? People should not be forced to fit to information processing tools. Information processing tools must evolve to support the natural thing people wants to perform. Because people got Kanji letters already, we support that. The summary based on "do you store your files in xxx?" was nice :-) itojun To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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