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000034_icon-group-sender _Mon Jan 30 05:26:11 1995.msg
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Received: by cheltenham.cs.arizona.edu; Sun, 29 Jan 1995 22:33:28 MST
To: icon-group-l@cs.arizona.edu
Date: Mon, 30 Jan 1995 05:26:11 GMT
From: goer@quads.uchicago.edu (Richard L. Goerwitz)
Message-Id: <1995Jan30.052611.25301@midway.uchicago.edu>
Organization: University of Chicago
Sender: icon-group-request@cs.arizona.edu
References: <3g4tkn$iei@jabba.cybernetics.net>, <1995Jan26.231752.14462@midway.uchicago.edu>, <keving.83.00E02940@primenet.com>
Reply-To: goer@midway.uchicago.edu
Subject: Re: Double-Byre Characters or Unicode?
Errors-To: icon-group-errors@cs.arizona.edu
Kevin Goldstein writes:
>
>Personally, I'm not looking for either. But I do hear a lot of people looking
>for *Unicode* support, which defines a 16-bit wide character set.
But what is Unicode support? Do you mean simply that Icon accepts wide
characters internally? That it defines wide character IO? Or do you
mean that Icon should accept Unicode literals in its source files, via
UTF-8 or the like? What about the graphics functions? Should they be
Unicode confirmant? And why, BTW, fixate on Unicode? ISO 10646 is also
important. And in Asian countries, Unicode is not popular, and probably
won't be for a long time, if ever.
There is a lot of thought that's going to have to go into just what
this all really means.
And then someone is going to have to gather an army of people to re-
code the Icon run-time system. Otherwise, you can kiss the whole idea
goodbye.
This actually might make a good research topic. Multilingual and wide
character support, as well as multi-byte support, and I/O considera-
tions (esp. for visual interfaces) are all going to take some deep and
intense thought.
--
Richard L. Goerwitz *** goer@midway.uchicago.edu