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From: carlton@scws8.harvard.edu (david carlton)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd,comp.os.linux
Subject: Re: Dumb Americans (was INTERNATIONALIZATION: JAPAN, FAR EAST)
Message-ID: <CARLTON.92Dec21163013@scws8.harvard.edu>
Date: 21 Dec 92 21:30:13 GMT
References: <1992Dec18.212323.26882@netcom.com>
<1992Dec18.235809.15484@midway.uchicago.edu> <agp22+#@rpi.edu> <1gvpt0INN8s0@hrd769.brooks.af.mil>
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In-reply-to: news@hrd769.brooks.af.mil's message of 19 Dec 1992 12:33:04 -0600
In article <1gvpt0INN8s0@hrd769.brooks.af.mil>, news@hrd769.brooks.af.mil (InterNet News) writes:
> So, I have a suggestion. Change someone. If you think
> internationalization is a snap, try it. Get convinced that it is
> hard to retrofit, but relatively simple to design for and proceed
> from there.
I don't believe you. I could believe that doing it badly (well enough
to handle most European languages, say) is easy, but I think doing it
well takes a lot of work. You have to deal with different character
sets, ways of text entry, direction of text, mixing scripts,
connection rules, and so forth; some of these are not difficult
problems, perhaps, but a lot of them are. For example, if you want to
type something in the Nagari script, hardly an uncommon script, you
will either have to have an overly complicated and artificial method
of entering text (bad - this puts unnecessary burden on the user),
read ahead in the input stream before figuring out what to put on the
screen (crummy for interactive input), or deal with the fact that what
you have put on the screen is going to change even when the user keeps
on typing without deleting (bad, because it makes the characters on
the screen jump around a lot.) Doing any sort of decent solution will
take a lot of extra coding, require a lot of research to figure out
what the problems are and what sort of solution people prefer, require
care not to lead to bloated programs (if you care), and is not what I
would call "relatively simple".
Perhaps I'm missing something, though - would you care to share with
us your methods for designing for internationalization?
david carlton
carlton@husc.harvard.edu
Learning Sanskrit would be more amusing.
- Johnny Inkslinger, in _Paul Bunyan_