Re: japanese environment problems
On Fri, May 04, 2001 at 09:52:21AM +0900, JC Helary wrote:
[···]
> ok, i browsed cjkv last night once again and the part about
> programming languages with special interest. it mentions java perl and
> python mostly for their ability to handle cjkv text. these are 3
> languages i could try to learn if i had a project to concentrate on.
>
> now, i thought maybe, to understand better what is at stake i should
> get a package source and try to figure out how to i18nze it. i
> downloaded ee (the easy editor) source and i tried to look through it.
> hahaha, a little too hard. so i though maybe i could try to write a
> small text editor myself so i can write in japanese under a console ?
>
> so what do you advise me to go on on this idea (languages, books) or
> maybe i should start somewhere else ?
I think that a thin wrapper around the ncurses and/or readline libraries
that would provides cjkv support would be a neat thing. (I have no idea
whether anything like this already exists.) When you do that, you would
at the same time learn how to use these libraries, which gives you some
background for cjkv-izing console apps that use ncurses/readline.
Something I would wish for is a japanese-capable version of w3m
(text-mode web browser), but that's probably not so trivial either.
As application implementation language I'd think that C is unavoidable.
Nevertheless it is *always* a good idea to learn Perl, and it will be
useful for quite a number of small (and even some big) tasks. Once you
get the hang of it, you'll never want to be without it again. I would
advise against learning Java for the above purpose. Java is not a mere
programming language, it's a whole separate platform. And AFAIK it
doesn't have special cjkv support; it just uses Unicode, which is a
totally different story. Python, as I understand it, is somewhat like
Perl, with nicer but more prohibitive and arguably less expressive
syntax. It's certainly not a bad idea to learn it, but, from a unix
programmer point of view, I think it's more effective to go for Perl
first. Just read your way through `man perldata' and `man perlsyn', and
go on from there wherever you like.
Regarding books, since you already seem to own "CJKV Information
Processing" by Ken Lunde, I wouldn't know what else to recommend.
As a side note, I use console applications with japanese support (jvim,
slrn-ja, mutt-ja, xjdic) in kterm with kinput2-canna-wnn. You might want
to take a look at the documentation for kinput2/canna/wnn. Looking into
the sources for kcc and nkf might not hurt either.
-- Niklas
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