On Thu, Mar 29, 2007 at 04:46:14PM -0400, Rich Felker wrote: > I am a mathematician
I nearly became a mathematican, too. Just a few weeks before I had to choose university I changed my mind and went to study informatics. When I was younger, I had a philosophy closer to yours. Programming in assembly, thinking of files as byte streams and similar low level abstractions. But then having spent some years as system administrator and then as a linux distribution developer I faced a different, more user-centric philosophy and probably I learnt to think with the users' mind (more or less). Users don't care about implementation details, and actually they shouldn't need to care. They just care whether things work. They're not expecting for the theoretically correct solution if it takes ages to implement it, they're expecting a reasonably well solution within a short time. If as a developer you can take either a nice or a gunge way and both lead to a solution then of course you take the nice way. However if the disgusting way leads to solution and the nice way doesn't then you have to go ahead along the disgusting way. This is probably what a mathematican wouldn't do. There's absolutely no way to explain any user that his browser isn't able to display some letters unless he quits it and sets a different locale, but then yet other symbols won't show up and external applications started by the browser won't behave as expected. This is not a problem if the system uses UTF-8, just as any modern distribution does (so as the latest release of our distro :-)). But expectations of the users weren't different even those days when software were not yet ready for UTF-8. And on the other hand there would have been no technical reasons for restricting the displayable characters either. -- Egmont -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
