Subject: Re: (XoJIG 444) (i18n.155) Re: support for symbolic names

From: [email-masked] (Teruhiko Kurosaka)
Date: Tue, 21 Jan 92 11:13:37 PST

Dave,
  |From [email-masked] Tue Jan 21 02:42:08 1992
  |Teruhiko Kurosaka comments:
  |
  |> Walt Daniels writes:
  |>> So 90% of the "symbolic" names are just codepoint numbers. Why not just
  |>> use the numbers for the rest of them and eliminate the European bias!
  |> I agree with Walt.
  |
  |And so we end up at a point where we're going to see code like:
  |
  |	if (ch == '<540404>') {
  |	   ...
  |
  |which I posit means we've completely failed at the most basic
  |goal of internationalization; to offer a system that people
  |can *use* to help create global programs.  
My assumption has been that this discussion is about portability of
the localized programs....

If we are talking about internationalized program, neither
'<540404>' nor LOWER_O_SLASH should appear in it.  Only characters
that can appear in the internationalized program are from
the basic character set.  If you have LOWER_O_SLASH in your
program, the program is not global. It is limited to the execution
environment where such a character is available.

-kuro