NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/comp/std/internat/928

Internet Message Format | 1992-12-25 | 4.7 KB

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From: [e-mail] (Chiaki Ishikawa)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: Data tagging (was: 8-bit representation, plus an X problem)
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Date: 25 Dec 92 13:39:37 GMT
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In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Andrew Hume) writes:

>       just to get it out of the way, the name plan 9 is based on the movie
>   (as is clear when you see the CD-ROM Plan 9 is distributed on).

    Thank you. I can sleep well tonight by no longer having to
worry about the origin of the name :-)

>       there is a paper being presented by rob pike at the san diego usenix
>   on the plan 9 stuff (the postscript for that is freely available).

    I would appreciate to know how to obtain it as I am quite sure
there will be many like me who are interested in it.

>   the problem is that there is no good model for doing i18n.
>   Locales, in this sense, are a complete and utter mistake.
>   don't misunderstand me, they are totally wrong as well.

    I tend to agree. Others including Sun also admits LOCALE as in
X/open or POSIX is a moving target according to their recent doc I
have been reading.

>   having said that, i think the posix locale stuff has done a reasonably
>   good job of nailing down a bunch a details which need to be nailed down.
>   and apparently, a whole bunch of folks think that's the whole problem.

    As you pointed out, this is a big misconception. Locale only
scratches the surface and just showed that there are problems to be
tackled. Locale is not the final solution.

I don't know about other countries, but in Japan, locale
interpretations are now busily pursued by each HW vencor on their
upcoming OS (SUN, HP, others) , and I don't believe they will offer
proper solutions: their interpretations will be satisfactory to a
segment of the market, but I am quite sure others will not be happy.
What should we do?

>   governing that processing. if this was all that happened, we'd be in
>   good shape. but hey, what about networking? there are two problems
>   here. one is almost trivial; suddenly ``local'' is undefined.

    Yeah. POSIX and X/Open people seems to be saying, either we
live in a mono-lingual world (called local language), or at most,
bi-lingual world (maybe ASCII and your local language).  But, hey, I
need to mix at least two languages (Japanese and English) daily in my
documentation, and sometimes, we need to talk to a French company and
as a matter of fact, some program data are now in French, German,
English and Japanese! (Replicated for each language!)
Because of the limitation of current software, we have to maintain two
files for this database: one for Japanese only and the other for
English, French, German.

    [example omitted.]

>       i am not saying we can't fix these problems and more or less
>   get it all right. but we have to have a better model of how and to
>   what these attributes (that locales typically use) attach to.
>   locales will let us limp along for now, but they ain't the answer.

    I don't think myself that the locale in the current form is
the answer. It is too powerless. However, given the history of
computing so far, the fuss concerning locale certainly has waken up
many programmers to view the world beyond the cultural boundary.
(This awakening is probably the best result of locale.)

From a Japanese perspective, I can say that documentation for upcoming
Asian version of Solaris includes probably the best discussion of
locale in hardware vendor's documentation I have seen so far.  This
will make it easy for me to have a solid starting point for explaining
to a non-Japanese programmer what is localization, what is I18N, and
what has to be done to make software porotable.  (However, I think, as
Andrew Hume does, the locale processing itself is pretty much broken.
So, it is just a STARTING POINT. But, think about this. Before this,
we didn't even have such starting point!)

I am only advocating the importance of the awareness of I18N,
localization, etc. and not locale itself :-)

 Chiaki Ishikawa,  Personal Media Corp.,  MY Bldg, 1-7-7 Hiratsuka,
 Shinagawa, Tokyo 142, JAPAN. FAX:[phone], Phone:[phone]
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