Re: Programmers, script languages, and Unicode

Am I at risk?

Of course not.

Joel's article went on and on making it seem as though there was nothing but utter chaos before Unicode, then finally, towards the end, he mentions 8 bit ISO Latin-1.

Latin-1 is a truly monumental achievement. This character set contains all of the letters from the Latin alphabet and then some. Using this one, 8 bit character set we can represent the vast majority of the languages of North America, South America, and Europe.

If someone in China or the United Arab Emirates tries to use your application full of English dialogs and the dialogs all show up as question marks or whatever, how exactly does Unicode make your program any more usable? OK, now they'll show up as English. Fine. But can the user even read English?

Comment on Re: Programmers, script languages, and Unicode

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Re: Re: Programmers, script languages, and Unicode by kutsu (Priest) on Oct 12, 2003 at 16:45 UTC
Although I'll agree that Joel's article made a bigger deal out of Unicode then was needed or is true. Calling Latin-1 a "truly monumental achievement", I think falls into the same category. Latin-1 is a good language if someone in North America, South America, or Western Europe wants a program to be used only in those countries, but if a person from Asia (which includes many more countries then China), the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Eastern Europe, etc... needs to use that program it won't work. Basic thing is if you need a language other then English Unicode is the easiest option. BTW...at least in Japan, a great number of people speak and read/write passiable English Now for my review: This article places far to much value on Unicode, being that Unicode will not translate English to Japanese or Japanese to English just display text. Also, he seems to think, or at least say, that Unicode should be used in every application on the possiblity it might be used in a non-English speaking country, see earlier sentence on why this isn't possible. Saying that it does give good information on the use of Unicode and I would recommend people who are writting International Software read it. BTW...I started writting letters to a penpal in Japan in sixth grade and have continued that relationship in digital form using email, but in a business sense I have never needed nor used Unicode, but I might need it for Hindi(India) project, though that is put off for a long time Updated: I may have to use Unicode at work after all "Pain is weakness leaving the body, I find myself in pain everyday" -me	[reply]
Re: Re: Programmers, script languages, and Unicode by Jenda (Abbot) on Oct 12, 2003 at 15:04 UTC
Monumental indeed. Its usability ends on the former iron curtain. Where are the accentuated characters for Czech, Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Slovenian and Croatian? (all these do use the Latin alphabet.) Jenda Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live. -- Rick Osborne Edit by castaway: Closed small tag in signature	[reply]
Re: Re: Programmers, script languages, and Unicode by grantm (Parson) on Oct 12, 2003 at 18:09 UTC
Using this one 8 bit character set we can represent the vast majority of the languages of North America, South America, and Europe. Perhaps, but consider that the ISO-8859-1 character set does not even contain the symbol for the currencey used by most EU countries, the 'Euro'.	[reply]