Subject: (i18n.179) plan 9 and 10646

From: [email-masked] (Glenn Adams)
Date: Wed, 23 Dec 92 01:16:23 EST

>From: [email-masked]
   >
   >i believe these system (design and migration) issues have been
   >essentially ignored in all the work and fuss on unicode/10646.

I must add to my previous message regarding this.  I strongly
disagree with Andrew that system design and/or migration issues
have been ignored.  They were not ignored.  Rather, they were
determined to be outside the scope of the character set standard
as such.

The principle task facing the design of Unicode was (1) to enable
the representation of all the world's languages, and (2) to insure 
interchangability with existing representations.  The issue of
software compatibility was explicitly not a goal.  However, that
doesn't mean the issue was ignored.

In developing 10646-based systems, much work beyond defining the
character set needs to occur.  But that is above and beyond the
immediate goals of designing Unicode or 10646.  The Unicode
Consortium does have an implementation subcommittee and desires
as much participation from interested parties as possible.
Perhaps if interested parties would be more active in this process,
their needs would be better considered.

As for the use of Byte Order Mark, there is a maxim in there Internet
community which I think is useful here: "be liberal in what you
receive, and conservative in what you transmit."  For me that means
prepending a BOM to all 10646 UCS2 data I create, and using some
default heuristics when receiving a BOM-less 10646 stream.  I
agree that coming up with good solutions is going to take time;
however, I believe that the important goals of Unicode have been
met.  Now it is up to us programmers to find good implementation
solutions.  I do know one thing:  if all these implementation
solutions had to be solved prior to publishing the standard,
it would never have been published.

Glenn Adams