On 04 May 2001 15:44:23 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
Back from the weekend with sunburn (very important sign that it has stopped
raining here on the west of Europe!!!!)
>
> > All this does
> > is move the problem from being one that non-english countries have to
> > being one where it is a non-english and non-western european problem
> > (eg. Eastern Europe, Russia, etc.).
>
> Nonsense. The non-Western-European folks see broken behavior now
> anyway, unless they compile with MULTIBYTE and set an appropriate
> encoding. How would this make their lives worse, or even different?
>
> I'm merely suggesting that the default behavior could be made useful
> to a larger set of people than it now is, without making things any
> worse for those that it's not useful to.
This reminds me of e-mail software when I joined the net. 7 bit ASCII
only software made the use of accents impossible so we learnt to type
without them or put up with garbage in our mail.
I must agree with Tom here. There is a 256 caracter alphabet which is
standard in many languages. For North America, Spanish and French spring
to mind. How are you going to build a common market if these two
languages plus Brasilian Portugese are not supported in business
software?
Multibyte is supported for other alphabets. This is already a wonderfull
achievement for those concerned.
The standard backend should in my opinion support the LATIN alphabet. US
ASCII is a subset of that alphabet, it is not _the_ alphabet.
The JDBC and Java itself should also support the whole alphabet. All
this should be transparent for the programmer and the end user. Another
battle to be fought...
Cheers
Tony Grant
--
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http://www.animaproductions.com/linux2.html
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