Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!ccut!wnoc-tyo-news!sranha!srava!erik From: erik@srava.sra.co.jp (Erik M. van der Poel) Newsgroups: comp.std.internat Subject: Re: Reneging on promises (Internationalization) Message-ID: <4934@srava.sra.co.jp> Date: 21 Jan 91 08:03:51 GMT References: <2435@enea.se> Organization: Software Research Associates, Inc., Japan Lines: 57 In article <2435@enea.se> sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog) writes: > Also sprach Stavros Macrakis (macrakis@gr.osf.org): > > I agree that ASCII is the de facto standard, and that it is > > unrealistic to expect existing 7-bit ASCII programs to be updated to > > ISO 646. > > What really is the issue in the case of programming language, > or for that matter a command interpretor, is to not use > letter that are subject to variation according to ISO 646. > So it is not really a question of update, it is more a question > of not raising hinders for use of ISO 646. Yes, but Stavros is talking about *existing* programs, so how can it be anything other than a question of updating? (Not that I am for updating...) > One may claim that we'd best drop 646 and move on to Latin-1 as > far as possible. However, this if anything site-dependent. I > was contracted for two and a half years for a customer where > 8-bit characters were reality (DEC Multinational, though), but > now I am at my a major Swedish company and all their equipment > seem to be seven-bit. I wonder which of the following 2 alternatives will be less expensive to the company in the long run: (a) replacing or adjusting the 7-bit hardware, or (b) countless frustrating man-hours battling software incompatibility > At ENEA we mainly have eight-bit terminals, but to what use? > You cannot use the eighth bit in Emacs. I find it hard to believe that there is no 8-bit version of Emacs floating around in Europe. Here in Japan, we have been using 16-bit characters in Emacs for *years*. > Mail standards, as > was posted in comp.std.internat earlier, are explicitly seven- > bit. One of the rules of Junet, a Japanese network, is that the 7-bit JIS code must be used, together with escape sequences to allow mixing with ASCII. So many organizations convert to JIS before sending messages to the outside Junet world. They can use 8-bit codes in-house by installing 8-bit clean versions of sendmail. Also, B-News had to be updated to allow Escape to pass through. Of course, it is difficult to get all sites to install the updated versions of the network software, but "Where there is a will, there is a way", as they say. And the Japanese had one hell of a will. - -- Erik M. van der Poel erik@sra.co.jp Software Research Associates, Inc., Tokyo, Japan TEL +81-3-3234-2692