Re: I'm russian! was character sets

spinoza1111@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges)
14 Oct 2001 22:28:47 -0400

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From: spinoza1111@yahoo.com (Edward G. Nilges)
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: 14 Oct 2001 22:28:47 -0400
Organization: http://groups.google.com/
References: 01-09-087 01-09-106 01-10-021 01-10-061
Keywords: i18n, comment
Posted-Date: 14 Oct 2001 22:28:47 EDT

crystal-pin@mail.ru (alys) wrote in message news:01-10-061...
> "Joachim Durchholz" <joachim_d@gmx.de> wrote...
> > RKRayhawk <rkrayhawk@aol.com> wrote:
> > > It seems worth questioning whether professionals nowadays ought to
> > > be oriented to 8-bit foundations.
> >
> > Well, this depends entirely on programming language. For a
> > programming language, I'm still strongly with 7-bit ASCII. This is
> > because I want my software to be portable: across locales (which means
> > I have to write in English, and I don't really need more than 7-bit
> > ASCII), and across operating systems (which means it should be
> > representable on the common EBCDIC code pages).
> >
> > Besides, there are some uniqueness issues. For example, the letter "a"
> > is present both in Latin and Cyrillic alphabets, but the Cyrillic
> > variant has a code point that's different from the Latin one. I'm not
> > sure whether it's a real issue, and I'd like to hear any personal
> > experience from, say, Russian Java programmers. Anyway, I'm suspicious
> > about the issue; programming requires precision, and this uniqueness
> > issue is another source of imprecision.
>
> I'm russian. What are you talking about? The notation of programming
> language and objects (variables, classes...etc)naming rules can be
> pure 7-bit ASCII, but to satisfy Russia!!!(... do not forget our
> nuclear missiles) we must be able to write and manipulate strings in
> WIN 1251 code page(8bit), or unicode(16bit). To come to an agreement
> with China is much difficult, love us, we not need a lot! :)


State of the art in USA seems to be that managers will authorize
internationalization of output and input for end user but require
programmers to know English. I am trying to learn new languages as an
American but most American programmers want to keep on programming in
English and in a limited character set.


The danger, to me, is that computers will devolve to a sort of Coast
Pidgin, a language deliberately crudified and used strictly by
ruffians for trade.
[Well, gee, the international language of science is already acknowledged
to be Broken English. There is merit in writing programs that will work
regardless of the language in which the messages and I/O are written,
which tends to favor using a simple character set for the program. -John]


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