[Novalug] SuSE interest level

Richard Barnes richard.barnes@gmail.com
Tue May 19 15:54:32 EDT 2009


Actually, from the little programming I've done with UTF-8, it's
really not that bad a spec.   The only real problem is that it's
really hard to write cross-platform C/C++ code for it, for the single
reason that that community has the byte==char mentality so deeply in
its brain.

Really, internationalization issues (at this level) would go away if
everyone would just decide on a single encoding of Unicode.  AFAICT,
the basic conflict seems to be that backward-compatibility with ASCII
is basically incompatible with fixed-width characters.  You can have
one (UTF-8) or the other (UTF-32), but not both.

But still, if we could all just agree on one encoding (my vote is for
UTF-8), we could set to work modifying all the tools so that they
would work properly and we would need all of this locale garbage.

--Richard



On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 3:37 PM,  <jecottrell3@comcast.net> wrote:
> Yes, my point is that it's ALL bad. We live in a technical paradise/bubble where everyone speaks English, where ASCII is mandated by various RFCs. Abandoning a fixed character set and the equivalence of one character = one byte just A Bad Idea. Chaos will reign. How can anyone write programs in such an environment?!? Well, clearly, they do, but where has all the fun gone?ta
>
> I want my text Context Free.
> It's not just non-English I object to; even the English locale is broken, because it ignores case.
> The first time I did a rm m* and my Makefile disappeared, I was livid!
>
> And they broke wc...I used to get complaints about "character counts" being off by because binary data contained illegal UTF sequences. Looks like they fixed it by redefining -c as "bytes" tho.
>
> JIM
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Mackenzie Morgan" <macoafi@gmail.com>
> To: novalug@calypso.tux.org
> Sent: Tuesday, May 19, 2009 1:59:50 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
> Subject: Re: [Novalug] SuSE  interest level
>
> On Tuesday 19 May 2009 1:53:28 pm Bryan Seitz wrote:
>> On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 01:34:06PM -0400, Mackenzie Morgan wrote:
>> > On Tuesday 19 May 2009 12:32:55 pm jecottrell3@comcast.net wrote:
>> > > For starters, I know I don't want anything to do with
> Internationalization.
>> > Gee, isn't anyone else but me offended that fully 1/3 of most distros pure
>> > garbage? The only real locale is C or POSIX.
>>
>> I agree however I am sure other people benefit from them.  Would be nicer if
>> a lot of it wasn't mandatory.
>
> To be clear, KMail failed at proper quoting there.  Cottrell thinks it's silly
> that 1/3 of it is internationalization.  I just think it's silly that it's
> *bad* internationalization.
>
> --
> Mackenzie Morgan
> http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com
> apt-get moo
>
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