From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 23 Dec 92 01:23 EST

glenn (keld, i18n):

	i agree with essentially all the facts you present.
i would disagree in two areas.

	the first is that whether or not it is true, the perception
is that unicode/10646 is a solution for handling international
character sets in computer systems. i know it isn't; you know
it isn't; but lots of people don't. and it isn't helped by the
tentative steps towards encoding issues (UTF-1) and a processing
model (LR or RL order etc). nevertheless, i (and you and others)
still need to eductae such folks and say that more or less, 10646
essentially defines codepoints.

	the second is the issue of system design (by and large,
the stuff 10646 didn't address). certainly at the beginning,
the unicode folks were quite gung-ho about this; the world was
going to a 16-bit char universe with all that that implies
(and for unix-style systems, that is quite a lot). for some systems,
this may be a plausible view, but as i argued in my note, it
isn't in the general case. i know work is going in within
unicode (i said so!), but it is indicativeof the funny priorities
involved that the hardest part, system integration, has had
essentially no air time in either the unicode or 10646 mailing lists
(except when i have complained about the lack of a model).

	please understand i mean this not as a criticism of the
unicode or 10646 folks; its just that from the outside, no one
is addressing this issue. (as i said, designing character handling
libraries, although useful, is not system integration.) and i am happy
with the response that we are now working on the issues of
system integration; again, i just want to point out that this
runs counter to the expectation of most folks ``out there''.

			andrew hume