Re: Japanese input (was RE: tlug: Japanese)

["Matthew J. Francis" <asbel@example.com>]

On 09-Jun-98 Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> >>>>> "Matthew" == Matthew J Francis <asbel@example.com> writes:

>   Matt> With only a little glue in the right places, it could be
>   Matt> made easier _to_ support such things than not to.
>  
>  King Canute told the tide to go back to the sea.  I'm afraid you guys
>  are doing the same thing.

(Kingy didn't have nuclear explosives. Even the tide can be persuaded if
you cut a clear enough channel... :)


>  For text input, it will quite possibly be tuned to Japanese, and make
>  most people happy, but fail to be truly multilingual (if it is
>  multilingual) or be monolingual in Unicode.

Well, I hope that won't happen. If I fail to try for fear of failure,
then nothing can be gained, and I end up being just another bloke with
an opinion. Lord knows we have enough opinionated people already...


>  There is such a thing as UCS-4, of course, but as far as I know it is
>  100% empty except for the BMP and private space and the reserved
>  non-characters at FFFF and FFFE in every plane.  This means that the
>  system you are putting in place now must be completely flexible with
>  respect to the standards that will undoubtedly evolve for the use of
>  UCS-4.

Homework time; I don't know about the details of UCS-4. In any case, an
inflexible solution is a bad one, which I would hope not to be involved
in writing.


>  Matt> This seems so right to me on so many levels; from an
>  Matt> aesthetic point of view. From a code-reuse point of view; if
>  Matt> one thing must do it, it should be a program. If everything
>  Matt> should do it, it should be abstracted to a library. Even, in
>  Matt> a certain way, from a viral point of view - anything that
>  Matt> helps to spread The Source must be good, and making things
>  Matt> work better around the world definitely falls in this
>  Matt> category in my book.
>  
>  Sure.  Dreams are nice.
>  
>  Only question is, can it work in practice?  I can and do dream
>  dreams.  However, I respect that fact that some people who are smarter
>  than I in combination with some people with much more experience than
>  I and some people with both, with the help (and admittedly, sometimes
>  the obstruction) of hundreds of others have brought us to the current
>  sorry state of affairs.

Dreams are indeed nice, but they're also useless unless you *try to make
them happen*. I also have enormous respect for those who have gone before
me, but sometimes it takes a bunch of heretics to make interesting stuff
happen :)

If the whole thing turns out 100 times worse than I imagine, then the
very least that will have been accomplished is to make other people think
about how they could do it better. And that in itself will have been
success enough. Competition stimulates...


>  The answer is 42.  I don't know what it means, though ;-)

When I find The Question, you'll be first to know...
(Somehow I don't think it's "What is the multiple of 6 and 7?", though...
]:)


>    >> Why don't you join the campaign to world domination of Japanese
>    >> input instead? :-) That way you could do loads to make sure it
>    >> worked exactly the way you wanted it to while you dominated the
>    >> world :-)
>  
>  I have.  But my preferred OS for this development is not Linux; it's
>  Emacs.  XEmacs at the moment, as you know.

(X)Emacs has a great many things going for it. Unfortunately, one of them
isn't that I like it a great deal... but that is not a war I wish to drag
up. I am neither Emacsian, nor Vian, nor any other platform-ian.
Truthfully speaking, I am not even Linux-ian; more than any of those, I am
utilitarian, and use what is most useful to me. Right now that's a list
including Linux and KDE, and Pilots; in the future I imagine it will
involve GNOME. Therefore, in enlightened self-interest, and admittedly
also just because I like to program, those things are where I will expend
my effort.


Cheers,
-Matt.

"The results of this intrusion into your life will be used 'responsibly'
in ways you cannot even begin to imagine. Of course, the innocent have
nothing to fear from the rapidly expanding data industry."
 - Radiohead, Airbag/How Am I Driving?

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