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From: tmb@talcott.UUCP (Thomas M. Breuel)
Newsgroups: net.internat
Subject: Re: The real work of internationalization
Message-ID: <532@talcott.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 17-Oct-85 16:07:59 EDT
Article-I.D.: talcott.532
Posted: Thu Oct 17 16:07:59 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 20-Oct-85 08:49:35 EDT
Organization: Harvard University
Lines: 54
Keywords: internationalization or bust

In article <1558@uwmacc.UUCP>, edwards@uwmacc.UUCP (mark edwards) writes:
>   This attitude will continue the ORIENTAL invasion of our markets. I
> agree finding solutions to the CHINESE character sets is a very difficult
> problem. But stopping the ORIENTAL ( JAPANESE, KOREAN, TAIWANESE, CHINESE
> and others that might exist) invasion in native markets should transcend
> typical thinking approaches. We the computer people have the ability
> to do this.

I am not sure I understand how incorporating foreign (oriental)
character sets into an operating system can help stop
'the oriental invasion' (if such a thing exists at all).
Why don't you elaborate.

>    Another question: Don't these Unix Utilities output messages of some
> sort in text- natural language. Would you have the rest of the world
> learn and use English just because, WE the Americans (and other Western
> countries) are so narrow minded that we will not consider other usages
> of characters in our computers. COME ON !! This is net.international!! 

The rest of the world is learning and using English. Personally,
I think English is far from ideal for a universal language, but
it was established by historical accident and not concious choice.

Any attempt at 'internationalising' UN*X is pretty much doomed
to fail. Likewise, any attempt at 'internationlising' programming
environments is doomed to fail. Symbols and identifiers in programming
languages are ususally mnemonically chosen words or abbreviations.
In UN*X, the name of a user program is at the same time an
identifier in other programs (shell scripts), and its output
serves both as a user interface and as input for other programs.
This is one of the main strenghts of the UN*X way of operating
system architecture (what? you mean it was designed???).

The only way to provide a user-friendly, nationalised interface
in UN*X is to write something which translates between the
UN*X names and identifiers and the language the user understands.
From personal experience, I can tell you, though, that most
foreigners prefer not to use such interfaces.

>    After all, we Computer Scientists take the difficult problems, define
> them and come up with viable solutions. Lets not pass off difficult
> problems by just ignoring them. I can assure you the JAPANESE will not
> because they can't.

The Japanese will not ignore the problem of how to represent their
language on their computers because they have to solve this problem
for their own good. If you are really into selling computers into the
Japanese market, then you should also concern yourself with this
problem. If you want to make competitive products for the American
market, you had better ignore it. The Chinese writing system
is a very special problem (for computers, not for people) and
demands a very special solution.

					Thomas.