Peter Kirk <peterkirk at qaya dot org> wrote:
> Does everyone agree that "This is not a performance issue"?
You can never tell whether something is going to be a "performance issue" -- not just "measurably slower," but actually affecting usability -- until you do some profiling. Guessing does no good.
And does everyone agree on that definition of 'performance issue'? I've spoken with text processing engineers who certainly consider 'measurably slower' to be a 'performance issue', especially if that decreased speed is noticeable to users who do not benefit from changes to existing software. For example -- knowing that it is on Peter's mind -- if an existing Hebrew text engine is modified to be able to correctly render normalised Biblical Hebrew -- e.g. by buffered re-ordering of characters from normalised order to an order that can be processed by fonts -- is the measurably slower performance an acceptable performance hit *if* your priority is modern Hebrew text processing that does not require such re-ordering. While some software developers have, happily, devoted considerable resources to supporting minority languages and user communities, I can understand their concern if supporting a minority use of a script has an impact on the performance of that script for the majority users. Of course, I say this as one of the minority users of the Hebrew script, who would really like to see better support for Biblical Hebrew text processing, but I think it is worthwhile trying to understand why there might be reluctance in some quarters to pursue particular solutions.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED]
I sometimes think that good readers are as singular,
and as awesome, as great authors themselves.
- JL Borges
