Re: Query on UTF-32 encodings for letters

[Marcin Dalecki <martin at dalecki dot de>]

On 2005-01-17, at 20:09, Robert Dewar wrote:
> It would be interesting to know an example of what you state above.
> Certainly people have been using Latin-1 to write Ada in countries
> all over the world, and no one has ever found the folding rules
> for identifiers to be in any way inconvenient.

You must be joking or you don't speak any other language then english 
yourself.
Let me assure you that the most common exercise in i18n is to avoid 
automatic
case dependencies wherever possible. The most common example of the 
idiocy of case
insensitivity are file system names. This leads for example quickly 
into situations
where you:

1. Can't provide efficient hashing mechanisms for item lookup.
2. Can't even read the contents on a system with a different locale.
3. Can't change the locale at will.

And believe it or not it is more common in this world to speak multiple 
languages then to
speak only a single language!

The most common mistake is to think that systems are either Latin-1 or 
something
else. But in reality the most common case it that you want:

1. Change locale at the fly. (Yes the whole LC_ALL and famliy is 
literally nearly
usless...)
2. Use multiple locales at the same time.

Maybe people from aboard the USA are not such whinnies so you don't 
hear them
frequently complain. But if you are an english only speaker please just 
don't bother
even thinking about localization. My experience shows that every single 
localization system
devised by such a person was doing more harm then good. ISO for 
cyrillic is a nice example
for such a thing. Literally nobody to whom it matters is using it 
because some illiterate
imbecile managed to provide an 8 bit encoding for this alphabet which 
is in fact not in
proper order and which isn't even complete.