* David Storrs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2003-01-17 19:29:25]: > On Fri, Jan 17, 2003 at 10:59:57AM -0500, Dan Sugalski wrote: > > At 7:13 AM -0800 1/17/03, David Storrs wrote: > > >Do we at least all agree that it would be a good thing if Unicode were > > >the default character set for everything, everywhere? That is, > > >editors, xterms, keyboards, etc? > > No. No, we don't. > Could you explain why not? I'd like to be able to easily exchange > mail and scripts with people in other countries.
Hi, I am a native Lithuanian, and the issue of different charsets and unicode is very important to me. We used to use iso-8859-4 charset and our current standard is iso-8859-13. Now, when I say standard, it means an official standadrd de jure , not the standard de facto. Desktop systems are dominated by Windows, and Microsoft has a terrible attitude towards this charset issue. Windows still uses iso-8859-4 and a bastardised version of iso-8859-13, which is called windows-1257. Things would be great if everyone used Unicode, but again, this presents a lot of problems. I usually use utf-8 but this means that most windows users will not be able to read my writings in emails (Outlook just scrables the whole thing). So my point would be that the world is not ready for unicode. At least until major companies start to take it seriously. Sure, it would be a nice thing to have everything in unicode, but I am afraid that is not possible yet. Especially when we have a lot of old systems, where the only editor is vi via ssh. And I am telling you this, because I know how hard it is to live in a world where your charset characters are not in ASCII (and I'm talking not 7-bit ascii, but ascii as a whole). So, yes, it would be nice to live in a perfect world, but we are not quite there yet. Petras Kudaras -- Just Another Lithuanian Perl Hacker
