On 07/29/2002 04:25:18 PM Keld J�rn Simonsen wrote:
>Well, you were looking for a platform, and Linux is one of the more >prominent platforms, maybe the second or third largest platform today. >Or are you only looking for a Microsoft platform? >Anyway you can use GNU C on microsoft platforms. I wasn't looking for a platform. I was simply thinking how I would in general try to help people in small language communities get their writing systems supported. My point is that the last thing I would do is recommend that they use non-standard semantics for ASCII punctuation characters since it will limit the number of systems on which it will work. >And you do not need to be a skilled programmer to edit gnu libc locales, Sorry, but you have to be more than joe-or-sally-off-the-street user to do this. Relative to the average computer user out there, it takes a large amount of skill to do this kind of thing. It's fine for a technically-savvy person implementing it on their own system or even on a handful of systems under their immediate control. It's quite another if your talking about something that you might hope to see implemented throughout a language community, even one that has a population of only a few thousand or a few hundred. In that case, it's not practical to deploy custom locales on all their systems and then hope that the only software than any of them ever wants to use will be GNU based. >> It's *much* easier -- and, in the long term, safer -- for them to >> select from the extensive inventory of characters available in Unicode and >> to avoid using ASCII punctuation characters with redefined word-building >> semantics. > >I don't get what you are saying here, why should people be limited to >ASCII punctuation characters? Well, maybe we need to revisit what this thread is all about (in spite of the subject line): a small language community considers using "@" to represent a vowel since they need something in addition to the "aeiou" of ASCII, and the original question had to do with how to get behaviour appropriate to word-forming characters applied to "@". One answer was that one could create a custom locale in which such behaviours could be specified. My point has been that that language community would be much better served by dropping the idea of using "@" in this way and picking something else since, as suggested in your comment, 10646 has lots to choose from. Custom character semantics are very costly in terms of support, and significantly limit users with respect to the selection of applications that can be used. - Peter --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Peter Constable Non-Roman Script Initiative, SIL International 7500 W. Camp Wisdom Rd., Dallas, TX 75236, USA Tel: +1 972 708 7485 E-mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
