🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <527@talcott.UUCP> tmb@talcott.UUCP (Thomas M. Breuel) writes:
>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. 
>
>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.


  It seems to me that this is just the problem. Look at our Big Automobile
companies. A few years ago with the fabricated oil shortages the 
JAPANESE were the only ones to see the value in small cars. Now they
have a good percentage of OUR (the U.S.) market. Look at the stereo
market, the TV, VCR, CAMERA, ETC.... There are more JAPANESE and 
CHINESE then all those who natively speak English. 
  This attitude will continue the ORIENTAL invasion of our markets. I
agree finding solutions to the CHINESE character sets is a very difficult
problem. But stopping the ORIENTAL ( JAPANESE, KOREAN, TAIWANESE, CHINESE
and others that might exist) invasion in native markets should transcend
typical thinking approaches. We the computer people have the ability
to do this.
   Has anyone seen a JAPANESE word processor in action? They have 4 types
of characters: Kanji (the chinese characters), KANA ( KATAKANA and HIRA-
GANA alphabets of sorts), and they use a fair amount of English (and 
other foriegn words) words in their texts. Some of the important research 
for upcoming computer generations has to do with NATURAL LANGAUGE. Should
we just lay down and pass the wealth of our future generations over to the
EAST. 

   Another question: Don't these Unix Utilities output messages of some
sort in text- natural language. Would you have the rest of the world
learn and use English just because, WE the Americans (and other Western
countries) are so narrow minded that we will not consider other usages
of characters in our computers. COME ON !! This is net.international!! 

   After all, we Computer Scientists take the difficult problems, define
them and come up with viable solutions. Lets not pass off difficult
problems by just ignoring them. I can assure you the JAPANESE will not
because they can't.

							MARK
**********************************************************************

These views are solely my own and possibly reflect no one elses.

---
When given the choice of two evils, I always try the one I haven't tryed
before.
		    -- MAE WEST