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From: tuba@ur-tut.UUCP (Jon Krueger)
Newsgroups: net.internat
Subject: Re: Multi-font linkers (Re: :-))
Message-ID: <351@ur-tut.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 10-Feb-86 11:28:49 EST
Article-I.D.: ur-tut.351
Posted: Mon Feb 10 11:28:49 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 13-Feb-86 19:21:17 EST
References: <343@ur-tut.UUCP> <882@kuling.UUCP>
Reply-To: tuba@ur-tut.UUCP (Jon Krueger)
Distribution: net
Organization: Univ. of Rochester Computing Center
Lines: 24

In article <882@kuling.UUCP> andersa@kuling.UUCP (Anders Andersson)
> Anders Andersson, Dept. of Computer Systems, Uppsala University, Sweden
> Phone: +46 18 183170
> UUCP: andersa@kuling.UUCP (...!{seismo,mcvax}!enea!kuling!andersa)
> writes:
>Software dealing with all the properties of national characters will
>probably be huge, and I wouldn't like to include it in my operating
>system just to get my file listings sorted "alphabetically".

This is exactly my point.  And was the point of my first, :-) qualified,
posting.  It's silly to support the constructs for twenty major world
languages within utilities and environments that don't need them.  Unix's
human interfaces are text-oriented.  Programmers and users create and
manipulate text.  Word processing applications and such need multiple fonts
and native character sets.  Programming languages don't.

The question is how to integrate the two environments with maximal ease of
use and minimal overhead.  Up to now, most of what has been proposed in this
newsgroup could be achieved by a a document processing package and a few
conversion utilities.  This just doesn't justify major mods to Unix and
horrible space and time overhead at runtime.  I'd like to see integrations
proposed which are so worthwhile they do justify it.  I suspect a good way
to generate such proposals is to ask not what Unix can do for
internationalism, but what internationalism can do for Unix.