> Surely you aren't suggesting that these non-English speakers do not have > access to the ASCII (or EBCDIC) character sets for their editors, are you?
Surely you aren't suggesting that your editor doesn't have access to the Latin-1 charset, are you? Let's take a look at popular editors: vi - check emacs - check eclipse - check mutt - check (http://www.rano.org/mutt.html) Notepad - check A bazillion other editors - check (http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/utilities_editors.html) > I have worked on an app that needed to work with English (US and GB), > German, and Japanese. I do not, however, remember having to write my > code in anything but ASCII. No, I had to edit my -templates- and -data files- that included French text. Some of them could use HTML entities, but the datafiles intended for the DB couldn't. > As I mentioned earlier, most programmers in a corporate environment have > limited access to system settings. Changing them in some cases can cause > reprimands or dismissal. Systems are often set up with the bare minimum > of locales and character sets necessary to do the job. Also, you have to > deal with the situations where programmers are connecting to *nix servers > through a variety of Windows-based XWindows servers (Exceed, Cygwin, etc.) > complicates what character sets are available immensely. I have worked as a contractor in almost a dozen settings, most of them corporate lockdowns, and I've always been able to go to my manager and say "To be more productive, I need this tool" and it would be loaded the next day. The few times I've had to talk to an IT person to explain the tool, I'd do it over lunch (my treat) and it would be on my desktop the next morning. Saying you cannot get a tool you need loaded on your machine is, essentially, saying that you cannot play corporate politics. I'm assuming you can, which means this is a straw man. Rob
