Re: tlug: kanji or romaji for Japanese? (was: parallel-port IDE)

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "jb" == Jonathan Byrne <jq@example.com> writes:

    jb> On Mon, 19 Oct 1998, Scott Stone wrote:
    >> xemacs-mule does this now, without 4-byte.  explain that, if
    >> you dare.

    jb> The one I have only has support for 22 different language
    jb> encodings on it's "Set Language Environment" menu, including
    jb> several different variations on Latin.  So my preliminary
    jb> explanation at this point is "No it doesn't.
    jb> Nyaanyaanyaanyaanyaa!" :-) To do so would require it to
    jb> understand every encoding method extent today.  Does it?

XEmacs does not, because Thai, Ethiopic, and Vietnamese are known to
lock up at least one X server hard (the one on the head XEmacs
maintainer's development system).  GNU Emacs does support all of the
national language character sets registered with the ISO that are
supported by any generally available system, AFAIK.  There are a
number of such character sets that are supported by academic research
facilities but are not available in free or proprietary format.

Neither flavor of Mule supports, nor will they support, Micro$oft's
attempt to Balkanize language (and sell multiple copies of WinKludge
to the same user) by registering several dozen "Winkludge-<codepage>"
encodings, either.  I assume that you support them in this decision.
I'm sure SS does ;-)

    jb> Assuming it does, then you could conceivably display all of
    jb> the national character sets and encoding methods on a page at
    jb> once.  But you could hardly claim that this was simpler than a
    jb> single encoding that contained all characters that have ever
    jb> existed in any language that we have records of, plus leaving
    jb> lots of room for new ones yet to be devised.

This will not happen.  All of the practical proposals I know of for
using more than the first two of the 32767 planes of UCS-4 involve
importing national character sets wholesale in variant encodings.

You would still have the problem of translating massive amounts of
archived data, too.

-- 
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