On Sun, Jan 13, 2002 at 12:17:36AM -0600, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> >For Unicode acceptance, most Japanese users don't matter? I certainly hope
> >the Unicode C. never takes that position.
>
> For Unicode acceptance, most Windows users don't matter. Short of leaving
> Windows, they are locked into Unicode. To a lesser extent, most users don't
They are? Almost none of my textfiles on this system are Unicode. If I
write a GUI in Windows, it operates in the local codepage, not Unicode.
The underlying implementation is irrelevant.
So, if I'm a Japanese programmer writing a program operating in CP932
(my local codepage), it'll do everything in CP932. If I write a message
over the network, it'll be in CP932. If I need to deal with a Unicode
pprotocoll, I need to convert it manually. If the conversion causes
problems, I'll probably complain loudly and maybe not use the protocol.
Make no mistake: for most Windows programmers, Windows isn't Unicode at
all.
Now, it's not too hard for Xiph to avoid this problem, as long as they
define how to handle these translations. But the easy solution for
Ogg--0x5C to U+00A5--doesn't work for a lot of things. I can't convert
everything from CP932 to standard Unicode this way; my C source
containing 'printf("Hi\n");' would no longer function, since the \ is
converted to a yen symbol. And since nobody is budging, my only option
is to keep CP932 around.
End result? Other charsets stick around much longer, and Unicode takes
longer to become globally used.
> matter. It's a developer's choice whether or not to use Unicode, and for
> the most part, it's transparent to the users. Breaking ASCII transparancy
> for Unicode in some poorly defined circumstances (or even well defined
> circumstances) is hardly going to encourage developers.
Not allowing any upgrade path from CP932 to Unicode is going to
encourage them to stick with CP932, and that hurts *everyone*.
--
Glenn Maynard
--
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
