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Received: by minnie.vk1xwt.ampr.org with NNTP id AA5154 ; Tue, 22 Dec 92 07:00:16 EST Xref: sserve comp.unix.bsd:9149 comp.os.linux:19833 Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd,comp.os.linux Path: sserve!manuel.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!uunet!mcsun!sunic!kth.se!sune.stacken.kth.se!mathias From: mathias@stacken.kth.se (Mathias Bage) Subject: Re: Dumb Americans (was INTERNATIONALIZATION: JAPAN, FAR EAST) Message-ID: <mathias.724721622@sune.stacken.kth.se> Keywords: Han Kanji Katakana Hirugana ISO10646 Unicode Codepages Sender: usenet@kth.se (Usenet) Nntp-Posting-Host: sune.stacken.kth.se Organization: Royal Institute of Technology, NADA References: <1gksolINNmkg@frigate.doc.ic.ac.uk> <mathias.724467456@sune.stacken.kth.se> <id.M2XV.VTA@ferranti.com> <1992Dec18.043033.14254@midway.uchicago.edu> Date: Fri, 18 Dec 1992 23:33:42 GMT Lines: 77 In <1992Dec18.043033.14254@midway.uchicago.edu> goer@kimbark.uchicago.edu (Richard L. Goerwitz) writes: >One of the big criticism leveled at US Engineers is that they are either >too dumb or lazy to build into their software support for non-Western >scripts. Given that Linux originates in Europe, can we look forward to >better support for Unicode and ISO10646? At least for "long" charac- >ter definitions? I hope Linus Torvalds (author of Linux) will follow this thread. >Incidentally, although it's true that US Engineers often have really >terrible language skills, this is due more to geographical isolation >than to organic stupidity. There's just no need for multilingualism >here in the states, the way there is in Europe, esp. in the low coun- >tries and Scandinavia. I've never said that US Engineers are stupid. I am just too often disappointed when I FTP some appearently nice shareware/PD package (w/o src), and find that it is not 8-bit clean. Sigh. And not to mention bash (Bourne Again Shell). Deep sigh. And emacs w/o 8-bit patches (my name will then be B\345ge in Latin1). Deeper sigh. Please don't flame me! I know that many of these problems are being solved (or have been). But I'm convinced that the same mistake will be repeated -- by others -- again, and again, and again. The question is, *HOW* do we learn (mostly US) software engineers to write software systems that are easily localizable? Standards alone won't be enough. Many IBM PC shareware/PD developers seem to be unaware that some of the 128 characters above DEL -- placed there for use in applications by IBM -- are sometimes needed in the *data* processed by the application, and not only used to draw boxes and write fancy greek characters with. (One can question the qualities of this extended ASCII, though). Broad language skills should not be needed to write software systems that are easily localizable, just some *basic knowledge* of how other languages' scripts look like, and how they are represented (hopefully Unicode/ISO10646/Plan9-whatever). RE multilingualism in the US: Spanish is getting big in California, to my knowledge. And Spanish has diacritics. You have a large Chinese community, too. They are effectively hindered to use standard off-the-shelf American software if they want to use Chinese. And I guess this can be said of other ethnic communities in your country. Even English uses diacritics, occasionally. In Sweden, we have the Lapps (our alphabet + some extra, NON-Latin1 stuff), the Finns (quite a few live in Sweden too, and all use our alphabet, with exceptions), and a growing number of immigrants, many of them using non-latin scripts, most notably Iranians. In our vicinity, we have the Baltic states. They have a host of diacritics, e.g. comma-like things under letters etc. We (Stacken Computer Society of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, famous for our big collection of old DEC hardware) just shipped some old vaxen and sun 3/50s and more to Riga, Latvia (truckload on the ferry), and TeX won't do forever. And then there's Polish, Czech, Slovak, Sorbian, Byelorussian, Ukrainian, Russian, German, Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Rhaeto-Romanic, Basque, Catalan, and more ad infinitum (Latin has no diacritics!?), at least in Europe, and, of course, the rest of the world (Euro-centric? who? me? 8-). And we're all tired of dealing with the hazzles of localizing US-made software. (no offence intended) --Mathias >-- > -Richard L. Goerwitz goer%midway@uchicago.bitnet > goer@midway.uchicago.edu rutgers!oddjob!ellis!goer . <= it's actually a ring over the a Mathias Bage mathias@stacken.kth.se -- . <= it's actually a ring over the a Mathias Bage mathias@stacken.kth.se