Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.3 4.3bsd-beta 6/6/85; site talcott.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!gamma!epsilon!zeta!sabre!petrus!bellcore!decvax!ucbvax!ucdavis!lll-crg!gymble!umcp-cs!seismo!harvard!talcott!tmb From: tmb@talcott.UUCP (Thomas M. Breuel) Newsgroups: net.internat Subject: Re: The real work of internationalization Message-ID: <527@talcott.UUCP> Date: Mon, 14-Oct-85 20:59:49 EDT Article-I.D.: talcott.527 Posted: Mon Oct 14 20:59:49 1985 Date-Received: Thu, 17-Oct-85 01:43:46 EDT References: <149@ecrcvax.UUCP> <518@talcott.UUCP> <191@l5.uucp> Organization: Harvard University Lines: 35 In article <191@l5.uucp>, gnu@l5.uucp (John Gilmore) writes: > What will cause a LOT of grief is fitting the large Asian character > sets in. I saw a memo purported to come from somewhere in AT&T that [...] > It's quite a job when you realize that unless ALL the Unix utilities > process Asian characters as characters, the system will lose. Any What do you mean? Most UN*X utilities are programming utilities, and nobody is going to program in Chinese characters. And the demands of Chinese and Japanese word processing are so utterly different that a completely new kind of user interface and a completely new set of utilities is needed anyhow (sort, grep, &c don't really make sense with Kanji or are extremely tricky to do. And how do you propose does the shell deal with Kanji? And should file names be allowed to have Chinese characters in them???). As I see it, the most straightforward solution to the 'internationalisation' problem' is to leave the programming and system utilities alone (that also means not to put vertical bars into your logname...) and to provide special purpose word-processors for word-processing in your favourite natural language. This need not be a complete departure from the nroff/troff style word processing (to which I am, incidentally, very attached), but could be some extension to your favourite editor that deals with translating nroff escape sequences back and forth from your terminal's representation. Even if you managed to cook up an operating system which were capable of dealing with all kinds of Asian characters at all levels, nobody in the western hemisphere would want to, or even could, run it. In addition, it would still have to be able to communicate with all these old fashioned things like ARPA, BITNET, System V, VT100's &c. Thomas.