Unicode

[Mike McDonald]

>Date: Fri, 9 May 1997 16:40:10 -0400
>From: cmwilson@uncc.edu (Mike Wilson)
>To: lispos@math.gatech.edu
>Subject: Unicode

>What about linguists who deal with languages not covered by unicode,
>i.e. ancient japanese, ancient egyptian, Klingon, etc.

  What? Unicode doesn't support Klingon? Geez, what a useless system!
:-)

  But seriously, the problem I have with the current
localization/globalization effort is that it's only concerned with the
representation of characters. There's much more to localization than
just text. There's things like monetary units and printed
representations, physical units, idioms (gotta know how to cuss in the
receipient's language if you're every going to be a world class
flamer or worse yet, that a word/phrase in your language isn't
derogatory but is in his! Especially true for symbols.), ... Heck, I
can't even find out how big the paper is in the printer let alone any
of the more important things. If you're not going to support all of
the aspects of localization, then I'd prefer we stick with the
original unicode, ASCII.

  Mike McDonald
  mikemac@engr.sgi.com