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 XAA23899 for caml-redistribution; Tue, 19 Oct 1999 23:40:43 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from nez-perce.inria.fr (nez-perce.inria.fr [192.93.2.78]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id UAA24773 for ; Tue, 19 Oct 1999 20:54:12 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from ruby (pm1-29.triode.net.au [203.63.235.45]) by nez-perce.inria.fr (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id UAA06830; Tue, 19 Oct 1999 20:54:07 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from maxtal.com.au (IDENT:root@localhost [127.0.0.1]) by ruby (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id EAA23088; Wed, 20 Oct 1999 04:48:18 +1000 Sender: weis Message-ID: <380CBCF2.3642E89F@maxtal.com.au> Date: Wed, 20 Oct 1999 04:48:18 +1000 From: skaller Organization: Maxtal X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.51 [en] (X11; I; Linux 2.2.12 i586) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Francis Dupont CC: STARYNKEVITCH Basile , caml-list@inria.fr Subject: Re: localization, internationalization and Caml References: <199910171554.RAA18696@givry.inria.fr> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Francis Dupont wrote: > 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. Yes. And ocaml developers cannot go through all the pain of this complex field, and do not need to: workers in the field have produced an International Standard which guides how programming language developers should proceed. Not all choices are fixed, by any means, but the documents exist, and _are_ being worked on by people speaking many different languages. > => Asian languages seem hard and we can't ignore one third of the world... Not nearly so hard as Arabic and Hindic languages, in which the usual categorical composition of strings by concatenation fails. Similarly, things like collation sequences are a serious nightmare. But they can be implemented with (perhaps complex) functions, so it is possible to extend the support a programming language gives clients as time goes on. My initial point was that very few changes are required to prepare for internationalisation, if the UTF8 of ISO10646 is adopted, but one of the key things that is required, urgently, is to deprecate latin-1. -- John Skaller, mailto:skaller@maxtal.com.au 1/10 Toxteth Rd Glebe NSW 2037 Australia homepage: http://www.maxtal.com.au/~skaller downloads: http://www.triode.net.au/~skaller