From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: weis Received: (from weis@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id QAA04322 for caml-redistribution; Mon, 18 Oct 1999 16:19:12 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from concorde.inria.fr (concorde.inria.fr [192.93.2.39]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id RAA30538 for ; Sun, 17 Oct 1999 17:54:54 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from givry.inria.fr (givry.inria.fr [193.51.193.144]) by concorde.inria.fr (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id RAA07497; Sun, 17 Oct 1999 17:54:48 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from givry.inria.fr (givry.inria.fr [193.51.193.144]) by givry.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id RAA18696; Sun, 17 Oct 1999 17:54:47 +0200 (MET DST) Message-Id: <199910171554.RAA18696@givry.inria.fr> From: Francis Dupont To: skaller cc: STARYNKEVITCH Basile , caml-list@inria.fr Subject: Re: localization, internationalization and Caml In-reply-to: Your message of Sun, 17 Oct 1999 21:27:09 +1000. <3809B28D.F0300290@maxtal.com.au> Date: Sun, 17 Oct 1999 17:54:47 +0200 Sender: weis In your previous mail you wrote: > The current 'support' for 8 bit characters in ocaml should be > deprecated immediately. It is an extremely bad thing to have, since > Latin-1 et al are archaic 8 bit standards incompatible with the > international standard for ISO10646 communication, namely > the UTF-8 encoding. > > => there is a rather strong opposition against UTF-8 in France > because it is not a natural encoding (ie. if ASCII maps to ASCII > it is not the case for ISO 8859-* characters, imagine a new UTF-X > encoding maps ASCII to strange things and you'd be able to understand > our concern). I do understand the concern, but the decision on the International Standards has been made. => this is not so obvious because there are other encoding (UTF-X) without this kind of problems. I'll send this thread to a colleague who tried to get something better than UTF-8 at the IETF (but he was too late). > Yes, I know Latin-1 is useful now for French. > > => it is more than useful, Latin-1 (soon ISO IS 8859-15) is necessary > if you need really readable texts in French. No, what you mean is that with _current technology_ there is plenty of support for 8 bit characters, using code pages, so that Latin-1 is well supported. => yes, for instance you have a reasonable set of fonts. For example, there are a lot of text editors that accept 8 bit characters, and even permit switching code pages. There are almost none that work with ISO10646 or unicode, let alone accept UTF-8 encoding. (Yudit is the only one I know of). => I'd like to get some free ISO10646/Unicode fonts. I believe without them ISO10646/Unicode will not be accepted by users. I agree that this is a problem, but supporting Latin-1, or any other archaic standard, is not going to help move forward. => Latin-1 is not so archaic (it should be old enough in order to become archaic :-). It is bad enough that most vendors only support Unicode, which is a small, almost filled, 16 bit subset of the full 31 bit ISO-10646 Standard. => Unicode is not so supported... I believe people with international concerns can work together no matter what their native language. Some English speakers may be concerned, some, like me, are somewhat embarrased to be non-fluent in _any_ other language. [I speak a smattering of high school German] => It is great than English speakers support internationalization but we need other language speakers in order to get an as complete as possible one. For instance where is the first character of a string? An Arabic speaker can easily show to them this is not so obvious. However, Australia, where I live, has migrants from all over the world and support for many languages is an important issue here. Particularly Asian languages. => Asian languages seem hard and we can't ignore one third of the world... Regards Francis.Dupont@inria.fr