🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <527@talcott.UUCP>, tmb@talcott.UUCP (Thomas M. Breuel) writes:
> What do you mean? Most UN*X utilities are programming utilities,
> and nobody is going to program in Chinese characters.

:-) Of course nobody in China would ever program in Chinese.  They'd just
learn English because it's the natural language for talking to computers.

> utilities is needed anyhow (sort, grep, &c don't really make sense with
> Kanji or are extremely tricky to do.

I don't claim to know how to do them, I just claim that in Japan
people will want to grep their text files, the same way we do.  And
they certainly do have a sorting order (if not more than one), as we do.

>                        And should file names be allowed to have Chinese
> characters in them???

Of course file names should have Chinese characters.  Why deny the
essential benefit of a file system (a way to organize data with names)
to the people who happen to speak and write in Chinese?  The file
system code really doesn't care what those bytes of name MEAN, it just
remembers name<->data correspondences.  (Certainly the code that
implements the file system and its utilities is currently making some
assumptions about file names, and those will need changing.  That's
what this group is for!)

> 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...)

Given the choice of buying a system that lets me use my *name* as my
login name, or one that forbids it, other things equal I know which one
I will buy...or design, build and sell.

>							     and to provide
> special purpose word-processors for word-processing in your favourite
> natural language. 

These already exist and are not the subject of this newsgroup.  We're
talking about extending all the benefits of Unix (I presume you think
Unix is a nice environment to work and play in, yes?) to people who
speak and write differently than you do in Murray Hill.  The local-language
word processor problem is pretty well licked, though some of the solutions
(eg Japanese) still cost many yen more than an American word processor.