Re: editor alternatives?
Hi,
At Fri, 19 Oct 2001 13:33:19 +0100,
Jules Bean wrote:
> This is an excellent point.
Thanks.
> However: we are discussing the 'editor' alternative here. The
> 'editor' alternative is used by certain system commands to invoke a
> 'sensible' editor for certain system configuration files. (E.g. vipw
> uses it to editor passwd, I think).
>
> These configuration files are all 8-bit files; so an 8-bit editor is
> what is needed. A 16-bit editor (or UTF) editor might even tempt the
> user into putting 16-bit characters into a file where they are
> presumably illegal?
I use Japanese-enabled editors such as Vim 6.0 and Emacs 20 and I have
no trouble editing such 8bit files. This is because of the structure
of multibyte encodings such as EUC, ISO-2022-JP, and UTF-8.
I imagine you are warrying about using UTF-16 or UTF-32 (as known as
16bit Unicode or 32bit Unicode). However, these encodings won't be
supported by Linux because they are not compatible with ASCII and we
also don't want support of these encodings. Japanese people are
happy with using EUC-JP, Koreans EUC-KR, mainland Chinese use GB,
and Big5 is used in Taiwan. All these encodings are compatible with
ASCII. (In other words, a valid ASCII text is valid in these encodings.)
---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <kubota@debian.org>
http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/
"Introduction to I18N" http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/
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