Date: Mon, 27 May 1996 15:00:15 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: ache@astral.msk.su (=?KOI8-R?Q?=E1=CE=C4=D2=C5=CA_=FE=C5=D2=CE=CF=D7?=) Cc: terry@lambert.org, nnd@itfs.nsk.su, hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: X11R6.1 available... Should we use? Message-ID: <199605272200.PAA09188@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <199605272042.AAA00677@astral.msk.su> from "=?KOI8-R?Q?=E1=CE=C4=D2=C5=CA_=FE=C5=D2=CE=CF=D7?=" at May 28, 96 00:42:41 am
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> > > Real common practice can't be changed and requires KOI8-R now. > > > It not requires 8859-5 at all, so why bother to support it? > > > Only because it looks "better" from someone point of view? > > > > I could make the same argument regarding i18n support, or XPG/3 > > or XPG/4 support, or ISO 2022 support, or ISO 10646 support... > > etc.: "We Americans believe everyone should use US ASCII, and > > if you have to learn English to do it...". It's the same > > argument. > > Your analogy is incorrect, I say different thing: > > "We Americans believe Americans should use US ASCII, and > if you have to learn English to do it...". ================================================================== On the language bigotry of everyone, Americans in particular ================================================================== "We Americans" are pretty much serious language bigots; nearly as bad as those in France (no non-French words need apply) and Japan (use this Kana alphabet instead of that Kana alphabet if you are going to spell foreign words), and any other country you happen to name (I just picked France and Japan because they seem to be the most famous examples). Ask any US programmer who has studied the problem: the American lead in software technology over Japan is almost *soley* attributable to the fact that the Japanese aren't willing to give up Kanji for Kana, and thus fit their language into 8 bits, and all the characters in their language onto a keyboard without 33,000 keys (or worse, chording). With the increasing reliability of voice and symbolic (pen, etc.) input, "We Americans" will soon be losing our lead... ideogrammatic languages beat out alphabetic languages for information density any day. How many English sentences can you fit into 16 8-bit characters worth of bits? It turns out *everyone* is pretty much a language bigot... that was my point, that the use of the legacy KOI8-R was an issue of language bigotry more than anything else. Which is fine, as long as you are willing to admit it, and accept the limits that that imposes on you as a result of accepting it. Just like US proposals for runic encoding are anti-i18n 8 bit storage... want an English "#" sign? It will cost you two characters in storage and the relationship between file size and character count. Want to use your existing data in a UTF system? Recode it. Etc.. That's what I call language bigotry. God help you if you have characters, like Icelandic "Thorn" and "Eth" which don't fit into a 7 bit NRCS. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- You say to.ma.to \t*-'ma-t-(.)o-, -*(-w), -'ma:t-\, ... --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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