🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <191@l5.uucp>, gnu@l5.uucp (John Gilmore) writes:
> What will cause a LOT of grief is fitting the large Asian character
> sets in.  I saw a memo purported to come from somewhere in AT&T that
[...]
> It's quite a job when you realize that unless ALL the Unix utilities
> process Asian characters as characters, the system will lose.  Any

What do you mean? Most UN*X utilities are programming utilities,
and nobody is going to program in Chinese characters. And the demands of
Chinese and Japanese word processing are so utterly different that
a completely new kind of user interface and a completely new set of
utilities is needed anyhow (sort, grep, &c don't really make sense with
Kanji or are extremely tricky to do. And how do you propose does the
shell deal with Kanji? And should file names be allowed to have Chinese
characters in them???).

As I see it, the most straightforward solution to the 'internationalisation'
problem' is to leave the programming and system utilities alone (that
also means not to put vertical bars into your logname...) and to provide
special purpose word-processors for word-processing in your favourite
natural language. 

This need not be a complete departure from the nroff/troff style
word processing (to which I am, incidentally, very attached), but
could be some extension to your favourite editor that deals with
translating nroff escape sequences back and forth from your terminal's
representation.

Even if you managed to cook up an operating system which were capable
of dealing with all kinds of Asian characters at all levels, nobody in the
western hemisphere would want to, or even could, run it. In addition,
it would still have to be able to communicate with all these old
fashioned things like ARPA, BITNET, System V, VT100's &c.

						Thomas.