Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd,comp.os.linux
Subject: Re: Dumb Americans (was INTERNATIONALIZATION: JAPAN, FAR EAST)
From: carlton@scws8.harvard.edu (david carlton)
Date: 22 Dec 92 16:46:19
Organization: Citizens for Boysenberry Jam
In-reply-to: news@hrd769.brooks.af.mil's message of 21 Dec 92 23:30:44 GMT
Idol: Herbert Gro"nemeyer

In article <1h5k34INN88g@hrd769.brooks.af.mil>, news@hrd769.brooks.af.mil (InterNet News) writes:
> In article <CARLTON.92Dec21163013@scws8.harvard.edu> carlton@scws8.harvard.edu (david carlton) writes:
>> In article <1gvpt0INN8s0@hrd769.brooks.af.mil>, news@hrd769.brooks.af.mil (InterNet News) writes:

>>> So, I have a suggestion.  Change someone.  If you think
>>> internationalization is a snap, try it.  Get convinced that it is
>>> hard to retrofit, but relatively simple to design for and proceed
>>> from there.

>> I don't believe you.  I could believe that doing it badly (well
>> enough to handle most European languages, say) is easy, but I think
>> doing it well takes a lot of work.  You have to deal with different
>> character sets, ways of text entry, direction of text, mixing
>> scripts, connection rules, and so forth; some of these are not
>> difficult problems, perhaps, but a lot of them are.

> You don't believe that we did it, or that it is easier to design
> for ahead of time than try to retrofit it?

I don't believe that it's relatively simple to design for.

>> For example, if you want to type something in the Nagari script,
>> hardly an uncommon script, you will either have to have an overly
>> complicated and artificial method of entering text (bad - this puts
>> unnecessary burden on the user),

> We need a Nagari input device; the 101 key keyboard is hardly the
> correct vehicle for this type of processing.  Is the fact that a
> good Nagari input device does not exist because American engineers
> are stupid?  I don't think so.

Of course the actual keycaps on the 101 key keyboard are wrong for
Nagari, but there are more serious problems than that.  For example,
the combination of the three letters "tsa" (with no space between
them) looks different than the combination of the three letters "t s
a" with spaces between them.  So no matter what sort of input device
you use, you either have to force the user to explicitly specify when
typing a "t" whether it is followed by a space, by another consonant,
by a vowel, etc., or deal with the fact that you won't (usually) have
enough information to display a letter properly when the user types
it.  Maybe it's more of a matter of my biases than anything else (I
grew up using the Roman alphabet, and this may affect my opinion that
the natural way to input text in Sanskrit, say, is to input it a
letter at a time instead of a syllable at a time), but I think the
problem is deeper than the input devices.

>> read ahead in the input stream before figuring out what to put on
>> the screen (crummy for interactive input), or deal with the fact
>> that what you have put on the screen is going to change even when
>> the user keeps on typing without deleting (bad, because it makes
>> the characters on the screen jump around a lot.)

> You are correct; it is not going to be easy the first time.  From
> then on, it should be a relative snap.

If you do it right the first time, if you manage to hit upon a
solution that is easy for both the user and the programmer.  But
getting to that stage may take a long time, months or years.

I do agree that it's a lot simpler if you stick to output-only
programs that don't depend on the layout of their output.

david carlton
carlton@husc.harvard.edu

       HUMAN REPLICAS are inserted into VATS of NUTRITIONAL YEAST...