Unicode flame war (Was Re: Don't abolish non-unicode locales)
Rather inaccurate message title, I think. No one was discussing abolishing
non-Unicode locales
From: Tomohiro KUBOTA <tkubota@riken.go.jp>
> At Tue, 31 Jul 2001 05:41:00 +0100,
> David Starner <dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org> wrote:
>
> > These aren't problems in using Japanese;
>
> Translation: _you_ don't feel problems in using Japanese.
No, I mean if the world woke up tomorrow, and Shogun Ieharu ruled Japan, and
the rest of the world talked their way in and introduced computers, the
Japanese would have no problem using Unicode (sans possible Han unification
issues.)
Yes, I know there are various problems due to the fact that Unicode is
fundamentally different from older character sets. I wish instead of making
ISO-2022, they worked on a super-character set with that was designed to be
subsetted in actual use. But that's not the way it happened. And I'm sorry
that they can't agree on conversion tables, but there's nothing we can do
about that.
> I understand I can't ask Germans to use double-width characters for
> any non-ASCII characters. Similarly, you can't ask Japanese to use
> single-width non-letter-symbols (like triangle, star, rule elements,
> and so on) and letters (like Greeks and Cyrillics).
There's a slight difference between being totally wrong for a language, and
making older texts look ugly and out of proportion.
> > Round-trip compatibility with existing legacy encodings? Not a problem
> > in UTF-8 itself. IMHO unicode could have been much more simpler if they
> > did not try to keep codepoints for all those legacy encodings.
> The same thing is said for precombined Latin characters like "u"
> with umlaut and so on. They are introduced only for compatibility
> with legacy encodings such as ISO-8859-*.
Well, and efficency and so simple non-combining implementations could handle
the language. But, yes, that's true. There's a lot of ways Unicode could
have been better, but that would have killed it in practice.
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