🚀 go-pugleaf

this is probably pointless but i'll have one more go at extracting some
facts out of this interchange.

In article <2630@titccy.cc.titech.ac.jp>, mohta@necom830.cc.titech.ac.jp (Masataka Ohta) writes:
> In article <24551@alice.att.com> andrew@alice.att.com (Andrew Hume) writes:
> >~ Then, how can I create a text file which contains both Chinese
> >~ and Japanese?
> >
> >	i said i didn't know; presumably, there are magic commands (a la RTF)
> >that change fonts.
> 
> Very good.
> Then, isn't the magic commands a special escape sequence or something
> like that?
> Mustn't we know how that particular font specification works?
> Doesn't the font specification make everuthing stateful, so we can't
> seek or anything?

	the layer handling character transport need not know.
one would presume the display layer needs to know. as for seeking,
we can find word boundaries and all sorts of useful things WITHOUT
knowing higher-level information such as font changes or size changes.

> According to your criteria, 10646 is just horrible and utterly hopeless
> to us Japanes.
> Thus, 10646 can't be a internationally usable standard.

	we've come a long way; from a guess of mine as to how
NT does internationalisation, you've deduced 10646 is utterly hopeless.
this is called sophistry.

> >~ Making everything English text is another fatal misdesign of Plan 9
> >~ as an internationalized OS.
> >
> >	damned if i know where i said the text was english.
> 
> How damned Plan9 is. It is much better to be said "Not a tty" than
> "iwmczal aslkdjf lskjancm aslkio" on inappropriate ioctl.

	what? you said plan 9 is crap because it uses english. i replied
that i never said plan 9 had to use english. you reply plan 9 is crap because
it doesn't use english. this must be the logic equivalent of bistro math.

> Internationalization of "errno" interpretation is a simple and
> already-solved problem.

	really? i would think so for the cases like posix where there is
a predefined list of alternatives and implementations such
as a list of language-dependent strings indexed by error numbers work
just fine. when the errors are not so constrained, i am unaware
of any general solution. does anyone know of one? if so, could you
describe it here or email me please?


			andrew hume