i18n

[bill at horne.net (Bill Horne)]

Ed Hill wrote:

>On Fri, 2006-03-17 at 08:55 -0500, Jerry Feldman wrote:
>  
>
>>Most commercial Unix systems were internationalized a number of years ago. I 
>>know that back in 1994/1995 time frame, when I was maintaining lint(1) on 
>>Tru64 Unix (actually OSF/1 at that time), I made a number of changes to the 
>>messages. We used a message catalog, and when we made changes the messages 
>>had to be translated to a number of languages. We had an I18N group to do 
>>that. 
>>
>>The problem with Unix/Linux is that it is still based on 8-bit characters, 
>>and an internationalized program must be set up to use either 16-bit or 
>>wider. Java was written where it's native character type is 16-bits which 
>>is sufficient for a majority of languages, but not for Asian languages.
>>    
>>
>
>
>The above, as written, is simply not true.  UTF-8 is a perfectly valid
>Unicode encoding and, for the characters that match the ASCII 0x00 to
>0x7F, it uses the *identical* 8bits/character encoding and is therefore
>largely (read: as much as possible) backwards-compatible with older
>programs, text files, etc.
>
>UTF-8 has been the default encoding on many popular Linux distros for
>some years now and *many* popular programs (including most in the Gnome
>and KDE suite) support it.  For instance, Red Hat 8 (released Sept 2002)
>was one of the first distros to use (by default!) the UTF-8 encoding
>
>  http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html
>
>So quit spreading nonsense, Jerry.  If you don't have a clue about the
>topic (which is clearly the case here), then keep your wildly untrue FUD
>to yourself.
>
>Ed
>
>ps - If I'd hired you to work on i18n project and you displayed such 
>     a shocking level of ignorance, I'd have terminated you on the
>     spot.
>
>  
>
Ed,

Ad hominem attacks say more about the person posting them then about the 
accused, and I didn't see anything to disagree with in Jerry's posting, 
let alone anything that would justify an accussation of lying.  I 
suggest you apologize: flame wars about VI vs. emacs may be fun, but 
this is just degrading, to both you and the BLU.

Bill Horne

-- 
E. William Horne
William Warren Consulting
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