On 23 December 2013 22:24, Karl Berry <k...@freefriends.org> wrote: > Personally, I feel this new functionality goes beyond the intended > purpose of hello. It is not supposed to be a primer in programming. > It is supposed to be an example of using basic GNU infrastructure. > The simpler the code, the better. >
Note that the original purpose of the change was to do something encouraged in GNU documentation, namely to lift an arbitrary restriction of hello, which was that new-style (boxed) greetings could not be combined with user-supplied text. Given that is a good goal, the subject of Unicode must be addressed, since user-defined text may always be in Unicode. (Indeed, even built-in text is, and the boxed format should surely be internationalised). I don't see a way around this; nor do I think Unicode should be thought of something that is a "specific programming feature": multi-byte encodings are the commonest way of dealing with internationalised text, and treating them as a bolt-on extra automatically disenfranchises all the communities that need them for their languages, which these days, given the demise of 8-bit encodings, is pretty much anything other than English. -- http://rrt.sc3d.org
