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Date:      5 Apr 2000 23:38:32 +0200
From:      naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de (Christian Weisgerber)
To:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Unicode on FreeBSD
Message-ID:  <8cgboo$2scu$1@bigeye.rhein-neckar.de>
References:  <3.0.6.32.20000404100544.00882db0@mail85.pair.com> <Pine.LNX.4.20.0004041104290.6811-100000@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us>

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Alex Belits <abelits@phobos.illtel.denver.co.us> wrote:

>   People with genuine i18n needs such as linguists or people with genuine
> i18n needs such as non-English users? Linguists don't see Unicode as being
> sufficient,

Linguists are interested in languages, not in computer character
set issues. They are just users who expect their *applications* to
work. They don't know and don't want to know about arcane things
such as the current mess of 8-bit character sets and MIME. (Well,
not being a linguist myself that's certainly the impression I get
from sci.lang.)

Unicode certainly *is* sufficient as a character repertoire since
it aims to include all the scripts in the world. This goal hasn't
been achieved yet, but for some time now Unicode has been expanding
into areas where *no* previous character sets have existed at all.

> and everyone else uses local encodings/charsets.

I'm not a linguist and I want Unicode. By yesterday.

> However I oppose:
> 
> 1. The point of view that Unicode is the only possible or the best
> possible way to handle multilingual documents.
> 
> 2. The point of view that support of Unicode should be made at the expense
> of compatibility with everything else, or by the introduction of some
> unsafe guesswork such as application of UTF-8 validity check to determine 
> if the chunk of data is in UTF-8 or not.

Wonderful.
You are pretty much in agreement with Unicode supporters all over
the world.

You are arguing against a non-existent opponent. It's boring.

-- 
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                  naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de



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