Apologies for fanning the fires, but this hits kind of close to home ...
On 2005.3.3, at 07:39 AM, David Cantrell wrote:
[...] > and either anightmare or an impossibility to deal with non-ascii, but maybe that's because I'm just an unreformed Mac user :-)
If you put non-ASCII in your code you're doing something wrong. Language-specific stuff - including English - belongs in a seperate resource file if you care about internationalisation.
Resources have to be edited with something, and it is often useful to be able to use REs on them.
Also, making systems and apps universal is trying to solve a problem that shouldn't be solved, even if the tools are useful. Even if the core engines of, say, a medical system can be universal, there are huge pieces of functionality that should _not_ be so. If you try to run a Japanese clinic the way an American hospital or clinic is run, you're not going to help very many patients. Likely to scare a number of them, in fact.
The guys that build the local stuff should work in their own language as much as possible, and that includes not just comments, but, if possible, identifiers, syntax, and grammar. Otherwise, they tend less to understand what they are doing and more to think it's all just a mathematical game. And they tend not to really understand re-factoring if it doesn't work on symbols in their own language.
Right now, comments are about all that can be dependably worked with in non-Latin characters, but even those, it's useful to have a full and accessible set of RE-type tools to work with.
