Re:The flaws of thinking "Just use Unicode"
by lucumo on Monday November 16, 2009 @02:31PM
(#945100)
> I think the author's point at the end was: "Unicode" as a concept won't localize your programs for you. Well, duh?
That's his point as I understand it. But I disagree with the "duh" part. It's rare to see software that goes beyond simple translation.
> Oh, and there are languages with unbounded sets of "characters" such as Chinese which literally cannot be fully described in Unicode.
I read Chinese just fine in Unicode. Is there something I'm missing? You have 50,000 commonly used characters, 100,000 rare ones - this certainly doesn't bust any limitations within unicode. Makes fonts rather large, but that's another issue altogether.
The rest of the article seems to be confused about what unicode is - I don't think anybody seriously goes into unicode expecting it to practically translate for them. It's an encoding, that's it. It won't convert "," to "." depending on locale, it certainly won't rephrase your messages for you to be sensitive to local cultures. That's your responsibility, not the purview of a form of encoding.
I think the author's point at the end was: "Unicode" as a concept won't localize your programs for you. Well, duh?