Unicode Unification Objections

Aahz Maruch aahz at netcom.com
Sun May 7 15:03:03 EDT 2000


In article <eAhR4.6182$Za1.94927 at newsc.telia.net>,
Fredrik Lundh <effbot at telia.com> wrote:
>Dennis E. Hamilton <infonuovo at email.com> wrote:
>> Consider the following.  In Japanese texts, when a borrowed or employed
>> Korean word is used, a desired practice is to render the Korean
>> characters as different, even though some or all of them involve "the
>> same character" common to both languages.  However, the iconography (or
>> calligraphy) is commonly different.  This loses the ability to
>> distinguish the linguistic use of the character, forcing material to be
>> font-distinguished some how (e.g., give me the ones that look Korean,
>> not the ones that look Japanese).  This means that the distinction can't
>> be preserved in simple text.
>
>the distinction cannot be preserved in a naked unicode character
>stream, but it's done that way on purpose.  you cannot really handle
>text strings correctly (rendering, sorting, comparing, etc) unless you
>have language and locale information.
>
>this is as true for unicode as it is for latin 1 or any other multilingual
>character set.  after all, the "western culture" isn't really as homo-
>geneous as you americans seem to think ;-)

In other words, "someone" needs to devise a standardized system that
encodes all the information needed to represent a string.  To deal with
the cases Dennis talks about, you need to concatenate multiple string
objects into some larger buffer.  Am I understanding you?
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