Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 17 Apr 1998 14:29:19 -0700 (PDT) | From | Alex Belits <> | Subject | Re: unicode (char as abstract data type) |
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On Fri, 17 Apr 1998, Alan Cox wrote:
> > The problem is, for handling the data in applications UTF-8 is the very > > worst format ever invented by a human. > > In what ways ?
1. While doing absolutely nothing for real language-dependent operations on text without clumsy hacks around it, it makes things seem "internationalized" when they are not actually usable for non-iso8859-1 languages. However it creates more trouble for a programmer than any multibyte encoding for anything except the most trivial things.
2. It's based on Unicode, the standard, widely opposed everywhere except English-speaking countries (whose opinion doesn't count, especially on UTF-8 that is binary-indistinguishable from ASCII in ASCII characters range) and Western Europe (for what Unicode is specifically accomodated). For example, all Russian programmers (and me among them) that I have seen or heard, consider that "standardization" as an equivanent of spitting into their face.
3. It tries to avoid the unavoidable -- multilingual text processing must use some kind charset _and_ _language_ labeling to do things well and consistent with complex and diverse nature of human languages. While labeling is obviously quite a pain in itself, it's 1. can be easily extended, 2. can use existing localizable or localized software, 3. used and standardized in MIME, even though in a way that needs to be extended to be applicable for documents that contain multiple languages, 4. With reasonable effort that does not involve modification of existing software and configuirations can interoperate with everything that exists now if such interoperation is possible at all, 5. Is necessary to non-text-display-oriented processing (phonetic match, speech generation, statistical text analysis) and even high-quality multilingual typesetting.
Unicode just sweeps the dust under the carpet, pretending that the problem is limited to the storage and visual representation of multilingual text.
-- Alex
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