NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/comp/std/internat/993

Internet Message Format | 1993-01-02 | 5.8 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!pipex!bnr.co.uk!uknet!mcsun!sunic!seunet!enea!sommar
From: [e-mail] (Erland Sommarskog)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: Dumb Americans (was INTERNATIONALIZATION: JAPAN, FAR EAST)
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 2 Jan 93 23:01:01 GMT
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Organization: Enea Data AB
Lines: 110

Vadim Antonov ([e-mail]) writes:
>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Erland Sommarskog) writes:
>>So if I type a C then a million key presses later changes puts in
>>an H after the C how can the keyboard driver handle that? It might
>>not even be the same driver who are seeing the two!
>
>Aw, don't be silly. It's trivial.

When you can't explain write off the problem as trivial.

OK, I confess I'm silly. I am even plain fucking stupid, because I
understand anything. Could you divine guru explain how the keyboard
could correct what is going in my editor? Clearly you don't mean
that the editor is to be fixed - you want to save the applications
from keeping track of which language I'm using, don't you?

>>>why on the Earth do i need to spare bits for encoding glyphs if
>>>i already know the language and 8 (or 16 for oriental languages) bits
>>>is quite enough to map the alphabet. Don't you see this gap in
>>>the logic nullifying all benefits of 10646?
>>
>>What the hell has the number of bits to do with anything? Do computers
>>exist for the programmers of the users?
>
>Look, you've missed the logic completely. Read it please again. I also
>explained it several times in other postings.

What logic? I want to be able to write and read text in European
languages. Period. Then how many bits you use is not my issue, as
long as you give me something which I consider user-friendly. (Being
forced to keep track whether a certain dotted "a" is German or
Swedish is not.) How many bits you use is completely irrelevant.
(But since I want more than 256 symbols, you will have a pain if
you stay with eight bits.)

>What do you tell the poor user when he has a database with English
>and Russian company names (a case from my practice, to be real) --
>in both upper and lower case and the smart guys (apparently Erlands
>pupils) made a terminal which converts cyrillic codes for the letters
>of the same shape as latin to the latin codes? Go get a rope?

Yes, that is precisely the confusion which is likely to happen when
you assign the same character different codes depending on language,
and when the application program is not smart enough to equate them.

We had this discussion on the 10646 list, since this problem is present
in 10646 due to thanks to floating diacritics you can represent many
characters in more than one way. The general agreement was that a
good program would equate the two without notice. In that discussion
I stated that if the spell-checker complains because I'm using the
wrong sort of dotted A, I would scream "you fascist!" and throw the
machine out of the window. Of course this applies to Vadim Antonov's
wretched system as well.

>The basic ASCII principles (after reordering and replacing several
>characters) remained the same -- there is a way to convert upper<->lower
>case and there is a way to sort without asking which language every word
>came from (it's known apriori).

Nope. Not with German. Look in a German dictionary. Then look in a
German phonebook. Then you will find that the dotted suckers are
sorted differently in the two places. If you want to support both,
you have to know what the user wants. Or do you suggest that the
user should specify that on input with choosing the correct set of
dotted characters? What if another user wants the other order?
Sure, if he has write access to the text he could filter it first,
but then what's the difference with informing the program with an
environment variable or a clicking on the appropriate window item?

The problem with your idea is that you believe that everything is
known at input time. It isn't. If you have a list of names which
is to be used in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland, the list will
sort differently depending on the reader, not on who is entering the
text. The Swedish and Finnish alphabets ends with A-ring, A-dots,
O-dots. The Danish and Norwegian ends with AE-ligature, O-slash,
A-ring. Looks trivial for a simple bit-order sort? Nope. Because
the dotted A is equivlent to the AE ligature and so is dotted O and
O-slash. Thus Danish and Norwegian names with slashed O should
appear together with Swedish and Finnish names with dotted O. So
the sort algorithm must make no distinction between the two, except
when everything else in the same. And the sort algorithm must know
in which order the user wants the text to be presented.

This is a simple end-user requirement which your proposal is not
incapabale to handle. But it requires the same solutions as 10646
(or Latin-1) requires. But your proposals give me alot more mess
with other things which does conflict with end-user requirements
which 10646 does not.


>As i already said there is no easy way around -- you have to deal
>with those issues somewhere and it's better to have it solved on
>the elementary level -- otherwise EVERY program will be forced to
>keep track of the language

Yes, on elementary level. Just like any device-independent program
must be able all sorts of terminals. Can you say "routine library"?
I know you could.

>which is not easy and sometimes ruins the whole logic of the
>program (see shell globbing example in my previous posting os
>tr example before).

You've talked a lot about regular expressions etc. Frankly I
don't give a damn about those. The main bulk of computer users
are not programmers and don't know what a regular expression
is, so why focus such specific issues?
--
Erland Sommarskog - ENEA Data, Stockholm - [e-mail]
Jag gav en k{ck tjeck en check.