Date: Thu, 11 Jun 1998 22:51:13 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: mike@smith.net.au (Mike Smith) Cc: junker@jazz.snu.ac.kr, itojun@itojun.org, kline@tao.thought.org, tlambert@primenet.com, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: internationalization Message-ID: <199806112251.PAA29278@usr09.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <199806111325.GAA01739@antipodes.cdrom.com> from "Mike Smith" at Jun 11, 98 06:25:12 am
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> If the GNU gettext is GPL'd, using it for i18n work on the base FreeBSD > system would seem to be a pretty bad idea. If we're serious about > doing this "right", we need something that we can integrate entirely. I agree completely. We must not bind ourselves to that cross. > Just for reference's sake, what's wrong with the XPG3 support we > currently have (catopen/catclose/catgets)? XPG/3 does not support multibyte encoding, such as EUC. It supports only character set shift encoding (per ISO 2022), such as used by what is calle "Shift-JIS". 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. 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. The most damning argument I can put forth against ISO 2022 is that it is inferior to SGML, even if SGML is only used as a font family markup language (which is all that ISO 2022 is). 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
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