Doug, I appreciate that you are trying to be helpful, so thank you very much for the thought, but your email was, shall we say, not correctly targetted. I write compilers. I design computer languages. I write operating systems. I am trying to get an understanding of Unicode so that the things I design, the next generation of such things, will behaves as the Unicode consortium want them to. We've been talking here about hypothetical future computer languages. It's people like me that will write them. So you see, I already know the things you detail below. It seems to me that you have stated the obvious, and (I'm sure it wasn't intended but) it does come across as kind of patronising.
In any case, I _imagine_ that a future compiler, running on a future operating system, will contain a system directory which will contain A VERSION of Unicode - by which I mean A VERSION of the Unicode data files, as supplied by the consortium. The hypothetical OS will then parse said files into an internal form that only it needs to know about, and make Unicode functionality available to applications (such as future compilers) in the form of standard API calls. A future compiler will simply have to call some function, which may be called something like is_indentifier_char(), and act on the return value (true or false) accordingly. The behaviour of the compiler, and indeed the whole OS, can be upgraded to behave in accordance with a new version of Unicode, simply by storing the new data files in the right place. You will not need to get upgraded applications. You will not need to recompile the kernel. Thus, in this future system, one will indeed "store a version of Unicode on your machine" Okay, so not everyone has the same vision of how things will work in the future, and only time will tell how it will all hang together. In my vision, it won't so much be applications which are responsible for compliant Unicode behaviour, it will be the OS. My vision may be wrong, but I am, at least, actively working toward implementing such solutions. I _do_ know the difference between an OS, an application and a data file, believe me. I've been coding for three decades. I'm a newbie to Unicode, not to programming. I suppose I should have been clearer in making a distinction between the present and possible futures, or been clearer about what I meant. But when we're talking about Unicode, much of what gets discussed here relates more to the future than to the present. At least, it seems to, from my perspective. Jill -----Original Message----- From: Doug Ewell [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, August 26, 2003 4:22 PM To: Unicode Mailing List Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Proposed Draft UTR #31 - Syntax Characters <Jill dot Ramonsky at Aculab dot com> wrote: > I don't expect, however, to have to DOWNgrade my version of Unicode. > And I can't be expected to store EVERY numbered version of Unicode on > my machine. You don't "store a version of Unicode on your machine." Unicode is a coded character set, not an application. What you have stored on your machine is a number of applications, many of which support Unicode, and some of which may support a different version of Unicode from others. (OK, some of us do store a particular version of the Unicode *data files* on our machines, but that has no bearing on the level of Unicode support provided by applications.) -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
