From EVERSON@IRLEARN.UCD.IE Thu May 4 16:10:00 1995 Received: from eunet.EU.net by dkuug.dk with SMTP id AA20787 (5.65c8/IDA-1.4.4j for ); Thu, 4 May 1995 20:20:19 +0200 Received: from IRLEARN.UCD.IE (irlearn.ucd.ie [137.43.1.1]) by eunet.EU.net (8.6.10/8.6.10) with SMTP id QAA28226 for ; Thu, 4 May 1995 16:59:38 +0200 Message-Id: <199505041459.QAA28226@eunet.EU.net> Received: from IRLEARN.UCD.IE by IRLEARN.UCD.IE (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 8644; Thu, 04 May 95 15:50:41 BST Received: from IRLEARN.UCD.IE (NJE origin EVERSON@IRLEARN) by IRLEARN.UCD.IE (LMail V1.2a/1.8a) with BSMTP id 0479; Thu, 4 May 1995 15:50:39 +0100 Date: Thu, 04 May 95 15:10:00 +0100 (BST) From: Michael Everson Subject: Re: (i18n.261) NL locale To: Johan van Wingen , Internationalization list , Marion Gunn In-Reply-To: Your message of Wed, 03 May 1995 17:32 +0100 (CET) X-Charset: ASCII X-Char-Esc: 29 I must say that I personally admire the restraint that Mr Simonsen showed in his response to Mr van Wingen's provocative complaint regarding a POSIX Locale for the Netherlands. Indeed, it must be very difficult for the government of the Netherlands to procure any software at all. To my knowledge, neither IBM, nor Microsoft, nor Apple software localized for the Netherlands uses the Turkish code table which ships with software localized for the Turkish market. I suppose the Mr van Wingen will be writing equally provocative letters to those multinational corporations regarding his country's requirements. Mr van Wingen is, like all of us, also able to make mistakes. One can consider some of Mr van Wingen's publications regarding letters used to write European languages for instance. Despite numerous requests to include in the tables dotted consonants used in some writing styles of Irish Gaelic, Mr van Wingen refused to do so and published a specification which, for Irish Gaelic, at least, is inadequate. The note in his text suggesting that dotted consonants may become more popular "if printing technology improves" is rather embarrassing. I informed Mr van Wingen about discussions in the NSAI regarding support for dotted characters in 10646 and in the CEN prENV Mandatory European Subset of 10646. I invited him to read "Gramadach na Gaeilge agus Litriu/ na Gaeilge", which is the Official Standard, to determine whether dotted consonants were in fact PROSCRIBED in Irish (which they are not). In any event Mr van Wingen published his opus with the source for Irish Gaelic as a "Teach Yourself Irish" book published in another country, ignoring the reasonable requests of Irish experts. I should think that in light of this Mr van Wingen's comments regarding national expertise may be taken for what they are worth. In _Standards for the electronic exchange of personal data_, part 5, p. 110, in the normative Annex to the Atlantic subset, there is a subrepertoire given entitled ADDITIONAL IRISH which refers to these characters and their 10646 code points. This normative Annex does not appear in _Normen voor de elektronische uitwisseling van persoons- gegevens_, deel 5. It was nice to discover the chart in the English version, even if the glyphs were not available. Mr van Wingen has our thanks for including that chart; but it is unfortunate that in his other publications he has not been consistent. >The "made in Denmark" NL-locale specifies Latin-1 (8859-1). So does the map on p. 107 of _Normen voor de elektronische uitwisseling van persoonsgegevens_, deel 5. It's on p. 115 of the English version. >Implementers of locales are warned that use of this Danish version could >make their software unsuitable to government procurement. Should they >suffer loss of business as a result of having based their product on an >unofficial locale, a claim for damages to that Danish firm is perfectly >justified. Shame on you Johan. We are all trying to work to make this a better place to compute in. Can't you, please, try to play nicely? Best regards, Michael Everson, Everson Gunn Teoranta 15 Port Chaeimhghein I/ochtarach; Baile A/tha Cliath 2; E/ire*Ireland Gutha/in: +353 1 478-2597, +353 1 283-9396 Facsa: +353 1 283-7778 27 Pa/irc an Fhe/ithlinn; Baile an Bho/thair; Co. A/tha Cliath; E/ire