Theo's comment leads me to a question I've pondered recently:
Assumptions: Many apps, from independent sources, need to access the Unicode character data, A lot of these apps aren't overly concerned with the slight overhead of parsing the data as needed from Unicode-supplied data files directly. Similarly, such apps benefit from being able to easily upgrade to new Unicode releases by simply replacing the data files. It isn't very user-friendly to for every such app to store their own private copy of the character data files when a single shared copy would take up less space and be easier to maintain. It would seem to me that there is some value in establishing either (1) a standard location where programs can expect to find (or install) a local copy of the Unicode data files, or (2) a standard way to discover where such a local copy of these files exist. My preference would be (2), which would make it easy to configure a network of machines to share a single copy of the data files. Something as simple as an environment variable could work if developers were to agree on its name and semantics. (I understand there may be different mechanisms for different platforms, but it would be even better if a standard mechanism were cross platform). So, are there any conventions for this evolving? Or would anyone like to propose one? Bob On 24/04/2002 09:26:55 Theo Veenker wrote: >andreas palsson wrote: > >I wouldn't bother too much about memory efficiency; it's irrelevant >these days. Even your mobile phone has enough memory to store all >unicode data 10..20 times. Same thing for lookup speed. All you have >to do to get it fast is to wait (a few seasons). > >Theo >
