Perhaps there should be a "tounge in cheek" emoji to indicate this
On 30 May 2015 at 04:50, Andrew Cunningham <lang.supp...@gmail.com> wrote: > Geez Philippe, > > It was tounge in cheek. > > A. > > > On Saturday, 30 May 2015, Philippe Verdy <verd...@wanadoo.fr> wrote: > > > > 2015-05-28 23:36 GMT+02:00 Andrew Cunningham <lang.supp...@gmail.com>: > >> > >> Not the first time unicode crashes things. There was the google chrome > bug on osx that crashed the tab for any syriac text. > > > > "Unicode crashes things"? Unicode has nothing to do in those crashes > caused by bugs in applications that make incorrect assumptions (in fact not > even related to characters themselves but to the supposed behavior of the > layout engine. Programmers and designers for example VERY frequently forget > the constraints for RTL languages and make incorrect assumptions about left > and right sides when sizing objects, or they don't expect that the cursor > will advance backward and forget that some measurements can be negative: if > they use this negative value to compute the size of a bitmap redering > surface, they'll get out of memory, unchecked null pointers returned, then > they will crash assuming the buffer was effectively allocated. > > These are the same kind of bugs as with the too common buffer overruns > with unchecked assumtions: the code is kept because "it works as is" in > their limited immediate tests. > > Producing full coverage tests is a difficult and lengthy task, that > programmers not always have the time to do, when they are urged to produce > a workable solution for some clients and then given no time to improve the > code before the same code is distributed to a wider range of clients. > > Commercial staffs do that frequently, they can't even read the technical > limitations even when they are documented by programmers... in addition the > commercial staff like selling softwares that will cause customers to ask > for support... that will be billed ! After that, programmers are > overwhelmed by bug reports and support requests, and have even less time to > design other thigs that they are working on and still have to produce. QA > tools may help programmers in this case by providing statistics about the > effective costs of producing new software with better quality, and the cost > of supporting it when it contains too many bugs: commercial teams like > those statistics because they can convert them to costs, commercial > margins, and billing rates. (When such QA tools are not used, programmers > will rapidly leave the place, they are fed up by the growing pressure to do > always more in the same time, with also a growing number of "urgent" > support requests.). > > Those that say "Unicode crashes things" do the same thing: they make > broad unchecked assumptions about how things are really made or how things > are actually working. > > > > -- > Andrew Cunningham > Project Manager, Research and Development > (Social and Digital Inclusion) > Public Libraries and Community Engagement > State Library of Victoria > 328 Swanston Street > Melbourne VIC 3000 > Australia > > Ph: +61-3-8664-7430 > Mobile: 0459 806 589 > Email: acunning...@slv.vic.gov.au > lang.supp...@gmail.com > > http://www.openroad.net.au/ > http://www.mylanguage.gov.au/ > http://www.slv.vic.gov.au/ > >
