Bill Page wrote:
>
> I am quite curious about how many people are "running without Unicode
> support". In my case it seems that there has been considerable Unicode
> support available on my computers and in various packages that I use
> without me even knowing it. I have a feeling that maybe this is a
> general problem and that conservative attitudes and lack of education
> on this issue has resulted in a slow acceptance rate.
>
Basic support is more than 10 years old. Around 2000 I have set up
"totally Unicode" system (meaning that all programs that I was
using worked in UTF-8). I had to fix some bugs, patch few programs
and fight with configuration setting, but technically it worked.
However, for me killer of the idea was speed (or rather lack of it).
Namely, grep in UTF-8 needed 10 times as much time to find
ASCII pattern in ASCII file than grep in C locale. Some
other programs showed even bigger performance degradation.
Spectacular example was groff which needed about 17 seconds
to show almost empty manual page (after tuning I managed to
bring it down to 2 seconds, and it was possible to obtain
much smaller runtime by limiting set of usable characters
(I needed only Polish, 2 seconds was when allowing whole
BMP)). At that time my conclusion was that gains do
not compensate losses (grep is an essential tool for me).
Anyway, the point is that while it is possible to have system
set up to Unicode (and it is becoming default in newer distributions)
there are good reasons not to do so. Also, to make good use of
Unicode one needs apropriate fonts and all existing fonts are
more or less incomplete. For example MathML site presents
several examples using Unicode characters -- my Firefox was
able to show most of them, but not all (some characters are
missing).
So, I encourage experiments and private use of Unicode, but
ATM I want to keep FriCAS and its sources usable on systems
which do not support Unicode. Meaning I do not want Unicode
characters in source files. Using Unicode for internal
processing is fine, but we need non-Unicode option for
input and output.
BTW: My mailer does not support Unicode. Given that I normally
do not need/want Unicode in mail I do not consider this as
significant drawback, so I have no plans to change the mailer.
--
Waldek Hebisch
[email protected]
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