Programming and international character sets.

[Henry Spencer]

In article <621 at quintus.UUCP> ok at quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:
>...The kludges being proposed for C & UNIX just so that a sequence of
>"international" characters can be accessed as bytes rather than pay
>the penalty of switching over to 16 bits are unbelievable.

Some of us don't like the price tag of switching to 16 bits, *especially*
since the vast majority of our jobs and our customers only need 8.  The
Japanese (Chinese, etc.) are going to have to dominate the world economy
much more thoroughly than they do now to convince everyone to make
sacrifices of this magnitude for their sake.  I'm not sure about POSIX,
but the X3J11 folks had expert advice, from the Japanese among others,
on how to provide for internationalization requirements without forcing
non-internationalized users to pay a heavy penalty.
-- 
The Earth is our mother.        |    Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
Our nine months are up.         |uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry at zoo.toronto.edu