Re: Hebrew language character set

[dvdeug@x8b4e53cd.dhcp.okstate.edu (David Starner)]

On Thu, 05 Apr 2001 08:56:07 -0800, Paul Storm <paul.a.storm@lmco.com> wrote:
>Apparently this is not the trivial problem I thought it was.  As a Ada
>newbie it makes me wonder about Ada's capabilities for program
>internationalization.  In our internet age that is important.

Try this in C. (1) It's impossible to use Hebrew characters, since
wchar_t is opaque - you can only portably use ASCII from inside the
code. (2) If you just stick the Unicode Hebrew values in there, it
might work (since wchar_t is often some form of Unicode), but it
probably will print out UTF-8 or UTF-16, which will look like noise
on your screen or even Ehud Lamm's system. The encouraged solution
in C is to store all non-ASCII characters external to the program
and treat them opaquely, if at all. The correct solutions if you
need more are hottly debated.

I'm sorry - you picked a hard problem in any programming language.
I was about to blame the Americans (who invented ASCII and other
English-only, 7/8-bit codes, and spread them round the world), but
equal blame falls on the Japenese (who use three differnt codes, and
oppose one unified code), the Europeans (who hardcoded 8-bit codes
and especially Latin-1 everywhere), and generally anyone who
invented a solution that worked for thier language and quit. There's
no way to output a non-ASCII character and expect that it will work
in any more than a small subset of places.

There's no way for any language to portably guess what the
appropriate encoding of output would be. GNAT could possibly do
better, and hopefully I will find time to write up a decent proposal
on how it could do better, but the current solution differs little
from what almost any programming language would do.

-- 
David Starner - dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org
Pointless website: http://dvdeug.dhis.org
"I don't care if Bill personally has my name and reads my email and 
laughs at me. In fact, I'd be rather honored." - Joseph_Greg