Re: lua for unicode

[Björn De Meyer <bjorn.demeyer@...>]

Steve Dekorte wrote:
> 
> On Friday, November 29, 2002, at 06:46 PM, james@mathies.com wrote:
> > Unicode is great standard. It supports all of the world's languages and
> > then some.
> 
> Jim, remember when we talked with the CTO from etranslate.com in the
> Mission? Didn't he say that they found that unicode did not support all
> languages.
> 
> Cheers,
> Steve
> OSX freeware and shareware: http://www.dekorte.com/downloads.html

Exactly. Unicode doesn't even support the full range of (Chinese) 
Kanji characters used in Japanese. Unicode was in the beginning an 
evil microsoft invention, in which they tries to implement all languages 
in just 65000 characters. Problem being that Japanese alone knows 
80000 Kanji characters. Even now, the so called "CJK unification", 
that is in essence, the dumbing down of both Japanese, Chinese and 
Japanese ideographs is causing much discomfort in Asia... Unfortunately,
in the free software world, the illusion lives that Unicode is the 
derfinitive solution to the internationalisation problem. 

In reality, unicode does help, but it is not the end-all solution.
I've seen alternatives to Unicode, like TRON character encoding,
but those are not that much better, because they are stateful. 
We'd need some encoding that allows each language or at least 
each script to define their own character sets, whilst maintaining 
a stateless encoding. 


-- 
"No one knows true heroes, for they speak not of their greatness." -- 
Daniel Remar.
Björn De Meyer 
bjorn.demeyer@pandora.be