wchar_t values

[Norman Diamond]

In article <661 at taumet.com> steve at taumet.com (Stephen Clamage) writes:

>One member's name contains an umlaut (two horizontal dots above a vowel).
>He asked us to imagine how it feels NEVER to be able to see your name
>spelled correctly in any computer correspondence.  (I can't even provide
>the example here.)

This might be a bit excessive.  Surely the member's name is spelled
correctly in correspondence from his home country.  Japanese people's
names are usually spelled correctly in correspondence from Japan
(except when I'm writing it) but not in correspondence from Europe.

One issue is to make a programming language readable and writable
in a standard manner internationally, which means using some common
denominator in the character set and human readability factors.
This might be a wise idea.

The other issue is to force every computer in every country to support
all characters that are used in all the worlds' languages.  I think
this would be excessive.  Anyway, it is different from the other issue.
--
Norman Diamond       diamond at tkov50.enet.dec.com
If this were the company's opinion, I wouldn't be allowed to post it.