Date: Mon, 15 Dec 1997 06:58:53 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: grog@lemis.com (Greg Lehey) Cc: perhaps@yes.no, tlambert@primenet.com, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: blocksize on devfs entries (and related) Message-ID: <199712150658.XAA26680@usr09.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <19971215073048.57829@lemis.com> from "Greg Lehey" at Dec 15, 97 07:30:48 am
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> > When you think about it, it is fairly seldom an average user need to > > display multiple languages in the same document. > > It's fairly seldom that an average user will need to run more than one > program at a time, so what's all this fuss about multitasking > operating systems? > > I often need to display multiple languages at once. In European > countries, such as Norway, they may need to display English, Swedish > and Norwegian in a single document. Sure, you can represent all of > those with ISO 8859-1, but think about the Japanese, who have four > alphabets anyway, and the Singaporeans, who have four national > languages, each potentially with its own character set. In those > countries the requirement is very frequent. The Japanese can represent 21 languages. There is Unicode round-trip capability for JIS 208 + JIS 212. What is missing is the ability to seperate a bilingual Chinese and Japanese document, such that a Japanese does not have to sully his eyes with Chinese pretending to be Japanese. I think there is a valid need for the ability to multinationalize; the use of translation consoles and linguistic scholarship are two of the examples where this would be needed (but neither have the proposed alternatives provided code pages for "Linear B"...). But multinationalization is the exception, not the rule, and the ability to do the work is cumbersome, but adequately provided by the ability to produce Compound Documents. I think this fuss is political. I think it will go away when the first company prodices something which works. People, in general, do not give a damn about the underlying technology; they care about whether the underlying technilogy works to provide them with what they see in the forground, and _how_ it does this is a "don't care" state. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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