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Date:      Sun, 14 Dec 1997 22:16:09 +0100
From:      Eivind Eklund <perhaps@yes.no>
To:        Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
Cc:        chat@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: blocksize on devfs entries (and related)
Message-ID:  <19971214221609.48148@follo.net>
In-Reply-To: <19971215073048.57829@lemis.com>; from Greg Lehey on Mon, Dec 15, 1997 at 07:30:48AM %2B1030
References:  <199712132055.NAA29304@usr06.primenet.com> <8690toqdco.fsf@bitbox.follo.net> <19971215073048.57829@lemis.com>

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On Mon, Dec 15, 1997 at 07:30:48AM +1030, Greg Lehey wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 14, 1997 at 02:11:03PM +0100, Eivind Eklund wrote:
> >
> > 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?

Hey, I'm not arguing that it shouldn't be possible.  I'm arguing that
it should require a character set shift instead of shifting in extra
characters in the existing character set.  This is a question of
coding, not capabilites.

My problem with shift-coding it that it makes it hard to write simple
programs; in many cases it is better to have something that works for
the simple case (single character set all through the message) than
not having any support at all.

And if you have to introduce shifting anyway, why bother with Unicode
at all?

> 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.

Fairly seldom, actually.  I sometimes use two languages in a single
document to be able to hold foreign citations, but that's about it.
There might be a problem if a country has several official languages
and it is impossible to represent them in the same character set, but
that is the only case I can see it being a serious problem for anybody
but language scholars.

Eivind.



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