From: mathias@stacken.kth.se (Mathias Bage)
Subject: Re: Dumb Americans (was INTERNATIONALIZATION: JAPAN, FAR EAST)
Keywords: Han Kanji Katakana Hirugana ISO10646 Unicode Codepages
Organization: Royal Institute of Technology, NADA
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 1992 23:33:42 GMT

In <1992Dec18.043033.14254@midway.uchicago.edu> goer@kimbark.uchicago.edu (Richard L. Goerwitz) writes:

>One of the big criticism leveled at US Engineers is that they are either
>too dumb or lazy to build into their software support for non-Western
>scripts.  Given that Linux originates in Europe, can we look forward to
>better support for Unicode and ISO10646?  At least for "long" charac-
>ter definitions?

  I hope Linus Torvalds (author of Linux) will follow this thread.

>Incidentally, although it's true that US Engineers often have really
>terrible language skills, this is due more to geographical isolation
>than to organic stupidity.  There's just no need for multilingualism
>here in the states, the way there is in Europe, esp. in the low coun-
>tries and Scandinavia.

  I've never said that US Engineers are stupid.  I am just too often
disappointed when I FTP some appearently nice shareware/PD package
(w/o src), and find that it is not 8-bit clean.  Sigh.  And not to
mention bash (Bourne Again Shell).  Deep sigh.  And emacs w/o 8-bit
patches (my name will then be B\345ge in Latin1).  Deeper sigh.

  Please don't flame me!  I know that many of these problems are being
solved (or have been).  But I'm convinced that the same mistake will
be repeated -- by others -- again, and again, and again.  The question
is, *HOW* do we learn (mostly US) software engineers to write software
systems that are easily localizable?  Standards alone won't be enough.
Many IBM PC shareware/PD developers seem to be unaware that some of
the 128 characters above DEL -- placed there for use in applications
by IBM -- are sometimes needed in the *data* processed by the
application, and not only used to draw boxes and write fancy greek
characters with.  (One can question the qualities of this extended
ASCII, though).

  Broad language skills should not be needed to write software systems
that are easily localizable, just some *basic knowledge* of how other
languages' scripts look like, and how they are represented (hopefully
Unicode/ISO10646/Plan9-whatever).

  RE multilingualism in the US: Spanish is getting big in California,
to my knowledge.  And Spanish has diacritics.  You have a large
Chinese community, too.  They are effectively hindered to use standard
off-the-shelf American software if they want to use Chinese.  And I
guess this can be said of other ethnic communities in your country.
Even English uses diacritics, occasionally.

  In Sweden, we have the Lapps (our alphabet + some extra, NON-Latin1
stuff), the Finns (quite a few live in Sweden too, and all use our
alphabet, with exceptions), and a growing number of immigrants, many
of them using non-latin scripts, most notably Iranians.  In our
vicinity, we have the Baltic states.  They have a host of diacritics,
e.g. comma-like things under letters etc.  We (Stacken Computer
Society of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden,
famous for our big collection of old DEC hardware) just shipped some
old vaxen and sun 3/50s and more to Riga, Latvia (truckload on the
ferry), and TeX won't do forever.  And then there's Polish, Czech,
Slovak, Sorbian, Byelorussian, Ukrainian, Russian, German, Dutch,
French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Rhaeto-Romanic, Basque, Catalan,
and more ad infinitum (Latin has no diacritics!?), at least in Europe,
and, of course, the rest of the world (Euro-centric? who? me? 8-).
And we're all tired of dealing with the hazzles of localizing US-made
software.

			(no offence intended)

--Mathias

>-- 

>   -Richard L. Goerwitz              goer%midway@uchicago.bitnet
>   goer@midway.uchicago.edu          rutgers!oddjob!ellis!goer

         .        <= it's actually a ring over the a
Mathias Bage		mathias@stacken.kth.se
-- 
         .        <= it's actually a ring over the a
Mathias Bage		mathias@stacken.kth.se
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd