Re: unicode (char as abstract data type)

Khimenko Victor (khim@sch57.msk.ru)
Sat, 18 Apr 1998 14:13:20 +0400 (MSD)

18-Apr-98 00:05 you wrote:
> On Sat, 18 Apr 1998, Albert D. Cahalan wrote:
>
> > > To convert what? We have multiple encodings because we have multiple
> > > languages, and conversion through Unicode is useful only within the
> > > language because otherwise there will be nothing to map into. koi8-r and
> > > iso8859-1 charsets have no common characters except the 7-bit ASCII range.
> >
> > You have multiple Russian encodings.
>
> I certainly don't. If anything for any reason can arrive at my host in
> Russian, in encoding other than koi-8, it gets converted once (and yes,
> UTF-8 is used as intermediate format). The same happens with all properly
> installed Unix boxes with cyrillic support.
>
> > There are multiple Czech encodings.
> > I'm fairly sure most European languages have at least two encodings,
> > thanks to Bill Gates and the ISO.
>
> iso8859-5 is something that exists only in someone's sick mind, however
> DOS and Windows encodings are alive, and people already configured their
> software to convert them when it's necessary. And we/they certainly don't
> need yet another one.
>
PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE explain how I am could tune my VLM.EXE OR NET.EXE to
handle koi8-r in filenames! And the same about Mac AppleTalk client...

> > >> Think of a machine with several users and several filesystems.
> > >> Maybe they are all Czech, which Martin Mares reports as having
> > >> more than 5 character encodings. Each user wants to see the system
> > >> in their preferred encoding. Solution: the kernel reads filenames
> > >> from disk in whatever format is there, then converts to UCS2.
> > >> The library converts UCS2 into the format which each user wants.
> > >
> > > I have never seen users voluntairily using different encodings of the
> > > same language on the same OS -- originally multiple encodings for the same
> > > languages were created because of incompatible operating systems and
> > > hardware.
> >
> > People share both disk and network filesystems with other OSs.
>
> ...and in that case they have to keep the same charset on all systems
> that are supposed to read files -- for simple reason of being capable of
> understanding the data in their files.
>
You are completely wrong. Our web (and not only our!) server has (on server
side) files in both windows-1251 and koi8-r encoding. And in near future
there will be Mac encoding (Mac users are just connected and there is still
no content from them on web :-)

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