From: Jill.Ramonsky@Aculab.com
Date: Tue Aug 26 2003 - 12:28:57 EDT
Doug, I appreciate that you are trying to be helpful, so thank you very much
for the thought, but your email was, shall we say, not correctly targetted.
I write compilers. I design computer languages. I write operating systems. I
am trying to get an understanding of Unicode so that the things I design,
the next generation of such things, will behaves as the Unicode consortium
want them to. We've been talking here about hypothetical future computer
languages. It's people like me that will write them. So you see, I already
know the things you detail below. It seems to me that you have stated the
obvious, and (I'm sure it wasn't intended but) it does come across as kind
of patronising.
In any case, I _imagine_ that a future compiler, running on a future
operating system, will contain a system directory which will contain A
VERSION of Unicode - by which I mean A VERSION of the Unicode data files, as
supplied by the consortium. The hypothetical OS will then parse said files
into an internal form that only it needs to know about, and make Unicode
functionality available to applications (such as future compilers) in the
form of standard API calls. A future compiler will simply have to call some
function, which may be called something like is_indentifier_char(), and act
on the return value (true or false) accordingly. The behaviour of the
compiler, and indeed the whole OS, can be upgraded to behave in accordance
with a new version of Unicode, simply by storing the new data files in the
right place. You will not need to get upgraded applications. You will not
need to recompile the kernel. Thus, in this future system, one will indeed
"store a version of Unicode on your machine"
Okay, so not everyone has the same vision of how things will work in the
future, and only time will tell how it will all hang together. In my vision,
it won't so much be applications which are responsible for compliant Unicode
behaviour, it will be the OS. My vision may be wrong, but I am, at least,
actively working toward implementing such solutions. I _do_ know the
difference between an OS, an application and a data file, believe me. I've
been coding for three decades. I'm a newbie to Unicode, not to programming.
I suppose I should have been clearer in making a distinction between the
present and possible futures, or been clearer about what I meant. But when
we're talking about Unicode, much of what gets discussed here relates more
to the future than to the present. At least, it seems to, from my
perspective.
Jill
-----Original Message-----
From: Doug Ewell [mailto:dewell@adelphia.net]
Sent: Tuesday, August 26, 2003 4:22 PM
To: Unicode Mailing List
Cc: Jill.Ramonsky@Aculab.com
Subject: Re: Proposed Draft UTR #31 - Syntax Characters
<Jill dot Ramonsky at Aculab dot com> wrote:
> I don't expect, however, to have to DOWNgrade my version of Unicode.
> And I can't be expected to store EVERY numbered version of Unicode on
> my machine.
You don't "store a version of Unicode on your machine." Unicode is a
coded character set, not an application.
What you have stored on your machine is a number of applications, many
of which support Unicode, and some of which may support a different
version of Unicode from others.
(OK, some of us do store a particular version of the Unicode *data
files* on our machines, but that has no bearing on the level of Unicode
support provided by applications.)
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/
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