On Thu, Oct 20, 2005 at 10:40:44PM -0400, Rob Kinyon wrote: > > Surely you aren't suggesting that these non-English speakers do not have > > access to the ASCII (or EBCDIC) character sets for their editors, are you? > > Surely you aren't suggesting that your editor doesn't have access to > the Latin-1 charset, are you? Let's take a look at popular editors: > vi - check > emacs - check > eclipse - check > mutt - check (http://www.rano.org/mutt.html) > Notepad - check > A bazillion other editors - check > (http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/utilities_editors.html)
Not every installed version of the above can handle Latin-1 by default. Since many programmers have little control over their installed software, this remains an issue. Also, the ability to do this within the application is not well documented within many editors. Finally, most will of the above allow you to paste in Latin-1 or even UTF-8 data, but the ability to actually enter it from a keyboard using the editor is a completely different issue. > > As I mentioned earlier, most programmers in a corporate environment have > > limited access to system settings. Changing them in some cases can cause > > reprimands or dismissal. Systems are often set up with the bare minimum > > of locales and character sets necessary to do the job. Also, you have to > > deal with the situations where programmers are connecting to *nix servers > > through a variety of Windows-based XWindows servers (Exceed, Cygwin, etc.) > > complicates what character sets are available immensely. > > I have worked as a contractor in almost a dozen settings, most of them > corporate lockdowns, and I've always been able to go to my manager and > say "To be more productive, I need this tool" and it would be loaded > the next day. The few times I've had to talk to an IT person to > explain the tool, I'd do it over lunch (my treat) and it would be on > my desktop the next morning. Saying you cannot get a tool you need > loaded on your machine is, essentially, saying that you cannot play > corporate politics. I'm assuming you can, which means this is a straw > man. I don't think a programmer's skill (or lack thereof) in corporate politics should be a prerequisite to experimenting in Perl 6. My bigger point is about system settings which are typically locked down and not usually sweet-talkable. Also, getting new software purchased can be a painfully slow depending on the bureaucracy involved, and generally requires lots of beers and lunches, or the right catastrophe, which could have been prevented and/or repaired with the tool you want, to speed up the process. Steve Peters [EMAIL PROTECTED]
