Date: Fri, 12 Jun 1998 22:05:21 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: seggers@semyam.dinoco.de (Stefan Eggers) Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG, seggers@semyam.dinoco.de Subject: Re: internationalization Message-ID: <199806122205.PAA20631@usr01.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <199806122129.XAA25486@semyam.dinoco.de> from "Stefan Eggers" at Jun 12, 98 11:29:34 pm
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> Anyway, as long as there are good and easy to use converters from the > representation FreeBSD uses from and to Big5, GB, ISO 2022, Unicode > and others in the base system and the complete system (including > syscons/pcvt) gets converted I think I can live with the result. Shift encoding, such as ISO 2022 uses, requires the use of a state machine to convert. Or even use in the first place. This is one of the major objections to it, since I could "shift in" ISO 10646 and be done with it. > For practical reasons I'd prefer a fixed length of a character. The > software has to be written and modified by someone and for most of the > FreeBSD system software and ports collections this is people who use > ISO 646, ISO 8859 and KIOR-8. If they have to take into account > variable length characters it might scare some of them away and those > not scared have to deal with additional complexity. Actually, the ports maintainer is Japanese. 8-). My other objection, to the use of a 32 bit instead of a 16 bit wchar_t, is not based on memory and disk footprint. My objection is based on the fact that Unicode supports byte order determination for a two byte encoding, ISO 10646 doesn't support byte order and word order determination for a four byte encoding. So while I can select an ISO 10646 character set using ISO 2022, I can't write interoperable software using it. 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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