Re: [tlug] Re: Piping stderr?

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

>>>>> "Jiro" == Jiro SEKIBA <jir@example.com> writes:

    Jiro>  On this list, there are a lot of people who are not
    Jiro> interested in I18N and don't know well about it. 

Oh, actually I think almost all of them are interested.  They don't
necessarily know all the pages in section 3 of the manual, of course.

    Jiro> And actually I couldn't help doubting your mb*/wc* knowledge
    Jiro> when you wrote "libcsi" idea.

Sorry.  I simply assumed that "CSI" actually provided support for
programmers trying to write internationalized programs.  This would
require a lot more functionality than is available in glibc.

    Jiro>  If you use on the SJIS locale, yes, error will occur.
    Jiro> That's helpless ith CSI. But you can avoid by stripping that
    Jiro> locale.

So much for code set independence.  Now the poor programmer has to
know in advance what locales are "dangerous."

You see, I'm not talking about _me_, I know how I'm going to handle
this.  I'm talking about somebody who's trying to write her first I18N
program.  Pity that the poor lady is a Turk working in Germany, and
she never heard of Japan until the World Cup.  Shift JIS?  Nobody
could possibly really use something that broken, could they?  How
could a sane, non-Japanese programmer imagine that?

And why should she have to learn?

    Jiro> You prefer UTF-8 hard-coding, even it has incompatibly with
    Jiro> legacy codesets.

No, I prefer _real_ internationalization, where the programmer doesn't
need to know about the locales where her program is going to be used
to write safe, correct programs.  This may impose a certain amount of
restriction on the programmers or users, but that can eventually be
generalized in a safe way if needed.  Such need will rarely be urgent
for shells and scripting languages (remember them?  that's what we're
talking about).



-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
 My nostalgia for Icon makes me forget about any of the bad things.  I don't
have much nostalgia for Perl, so its faults I remember.  Scott Gilbert c.l.py