Re: Wasteful internationalization

[Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org>]

Björn Persson <spam-away@nowhere.nil> writes:

> Stephen Leake wrote:
>
>> That's a "small box" on my display. Apparently I'm missing that font.
>> 
>> Which is a good reason to not use such characters in programs. How
>> many people would know how to install the right fonts? (hint; not me
>> :) And how do you figure out what fonts they will need?
>
> I don't see the problem.
>
> There are two cases: Characters that the program itself uses, and Unicode
> text data that the program processes and displays. The first case might
> apply to a physics program that uses certain mathematical symbols. This is
> no different from dynamic linking. You have complete control over which
> characters your program uses, so you know what fonts it needs just like you
> know what libraries it needs. 

No, I don't know what fonts the program itself needs; that's the point.

The unicode Pi and other Greek characters display properly in the
Emacs binary distribution I'm using. So I might be tempted to use
unicode Greek characters in my Ada source code as variable names. But
someone else, using another editor on another OS, may not be able to
see it.

Fonts are different from dlls, because they are used by editors, not
my executable. 

And while I can build Emacs from scratch, that still doesn't tell me
what font Pi is in. 

There probably is an Emacs command that could tell me; I just don't
know what it is. And I don't want to get into that discussion with the
personal favorite editor of every user of my code.

> The second case applies to web browsers, email and Usenet clients, word
> processors and so on. 

And program source code editors; that's the case I'm talking about.

> These programs should ideally be able to display any Unicode
> character. That's impossible in practice as long as Unicode is
> growing. Users may also prefer not to have so many fonts installed.
> You might not want to have 60000 Chinese characters occupying disk
> space if you can't read Chinese anyway. This is no reason to limit
> these programs to ASCII. They're much more useful with Unicode
> support and an incomplete set of fonts than with only ASCII support.
> They just need to cope with missing fonts and display something else
> instead – and that's exactly what they do.

If my program uses unicode Greek delta and omega as variable names,
having them both display as a box will make the code unreadable.

-- 
-- Stephe