Subject: Re: (i18n 37) Re: japanese xopen locale with general charnames

From: Erik M. van der Poel <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Dec 90 15:33:44 +0900

> >1. Character names: changed to facilitate future international
> >   harmonization of national profiles.  (Just a guess -- I'd really like
> >   to know why you consider the new form to be preferable.)
> >
> >Dominic
> 
> I havn't looked at it closely, but I'm not sure either about whether
> this was the right thing to do.  This, remember, is a *national* profile,
> not ISO's opinion of what some profile should be.
> 
> Donn

OK, let's suppose for the moment that we declare total anarchy and
allow each country to go off and develop their own little profile.
Then the Japanese use names like <235A>.

Now one of the implementors, say, some guy from Denmark, decides to
write a charmap for 10646. He must of course distinguish between
Japanese and Chinese characters, so he chooses names like <j1821> for
the Japanese characters, because he likes short names.

Next, he wants to sell into the Japanese market, so he decides to
create a Japanese locale. He learns that his Japanese colleagues have
accomplished yet another miracle: they have written an LC_COLLATE
table for the Japanese language. Unfortunately, the character names
are all different, so he has to modify them, carefully, without
altering the collation definition itself.

This kind of extra hassle could be avoided if we harmonize.

Erik