i18n

[Ed Hill]

On Fri, 2006-03-17 at 08:55 -0500, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> Most commercial Unix systems were internationalized a number of years ago. I 
> know that back in 1994/1995 time frame, when I was maintaining lint(1) on 
> Tru64 Unix (actually OSF/1 at that time), I made a number of changes to the 
> messages. We used a message catalog, and when we made changes the messages 
> had to be translated to a number of languages. We had an I18N group to do 
> that. 
> 
> The problem with Unix/Linux is that it is still based on 8-bit characters, 
> and an internationalized program must be set up to use either 16-bit or 
> wider. Java was written where it's native character type is 16-bits which 
> is sufficient for a majority of languages, but not for Asian languages.


The above, as written, is simply not true.  UTF-8 is a perfectly valid
Unicode encoding and, for the characters that match the ASCII 0x00 to
0x7F, it uses the *identical* 8bits/character encoding and is therefore
largely (read: as much as possible) backwards-compatible with older
programs, text files, etc.

UTF-8 has been the default encoding on many popular Linux distros for
some years now and *many* popular programs (including most in the Gnome
and KDE suite) support it.  For instance, Red Hat 8 (released Sept 2002)
was one of the first distros to use (by default!) the UTF-8 encoding

  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html

So quit spreading nonsense, Jerry.  If you don't have a clue about the
topic (which is clearly the case here), then keep your wildly untrue FUD
to yourself.

Ed

ps - If I'd hired you to work on i18n project and you displayed such 
     a shocking level of ignorance, I'd have terminated you on the
     spot.

-- 
Edward H. Hill III, PhD
office:  MIT Dept. of EAPS;  Rm 54-1424;  77 Massachusetts Ave.
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