Attention: European C/C++/C#/Java Programmers-Call for Input

Not only that, but asymmetric mappings (e.g. Greek sigma) and different mappings for different locales make it impossible to define a workable set of rules to govern ambiguities.

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Reply to
Boudewijn Dijkstra
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Cape Town: English, Afrikaans and Xhosa. Note that RSA has/had 11 official languages when I last looked. Belgium has three and ...

The real problem is that the Development Character Set (DCS, Operating system Character Set (OCS) and Application (run-time) Charater Set (ACS) may all be different. Now translate

"Your balance at %time% on %date% is %value%"

allowing for: language order date format time format currency display

and make sure that you can cope with currencies with 6 digits after the primary value. Floating point just doesn't cut it with present ranges. For the new Hong Kong airport, the difference between two estimates for the cost of concrete just to cap the piles was US$ 10 million - the 128 bit integer calculation was

*way* better than the floating point one.

My point is that internationalisation of applications is *not* based on character sets, which are but one minor factor.

Stephen

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Stephen Pelc, stephenXXX@mpeforth.com
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Reply to
Stephen Pelc

Bravo! I am so glad for you to write that. Point well taken. And with all of this burden of internationalisation that people seem to want to put onto my back, I would never even get to first base when it comes to the the real substance of what I want to accomplish in the new programming language.

Reply to
Paul K. McKneely

Sounds like you are searching for reasons not to start the project :-) If you use some standard approach, like Unicode, I8N is only a very small part of designing a new language and most I8N topics can be found on the web or in books and are straightforward to implement.

You are writing in this newsgroup, so looks like it is a language targeting embedded systems. Things like the compiler itself, object format, linker, libraries for all kind of hardware and software tasks, IDE, debugger etc., are much more work and much more interesting. I8N is just a small part of the library and maybe some support from the tools for handling Unicode.

What do you want to accomplish in the new programming language? If it is just an incompatible C version, no one would use it.

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Reply to
Frank Buss

Op Fri, 30 Jan 2009 17:33:51 +0100 schreef Paul K. McKneely :

ISO 10646 is not a format, it's a standard. UTF-8 is an encoding for Unicode. What many (used to) call "Unicode" was UCS-2 (no escape sequences) which was later followed by UTF-16 (which has escape sequences allowing it to encode all of Unicode).

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Reply to
Boudewijn Dijkstra

Hello Frank,

I was at the time. I have followed David Brown's suggestion and I have worked up a plan to merge PhiText with Unicode. PhiText will become a binary superset of Unicode and Unicode/HTML for many reasons. My first software product will be an editor that can load files in several formats and save them back in any one of those formats. This will make it a useful tool for file format conversion. However, its main focus will be for writing source code in the phi Parallel Programming Language. The editor should also be useful for writing source code in any language based on Unicode.

The compiler elements will come next. I plan to use generic Unicode compatible software for such things as linker/library managers and debuggers. If I could find a suitable intermediate code format then I mind get by with not having to write a code generator. However, I suspect that the advanced features of the programming language might preclude some of the above possibilities.

I did some searching for what you were calling 18N and I finally discovered that the term i18n is an abbreviation for internationalization where the '18' stands for the 18 letters that are between 'i' and 'n'.

Although my software will need to be internationalized, I am a software technology developer so my customers will probably be the ones acutally doing most of the internationalizing of software. Because almost all of my customers will speak English (because software development is inherently ango-centric) I will probably not have to deal with the issues to the extent that my customers will.

Yes. You are correct. The language is targetted at making it easy to write operating systems from the ground up. This really targets embedded people because they are the ones who are going to produce the next generation computer platform. In fact, it is their job to do it every day:)

Paul

Reply to
Paul K. McKneely

Yes, sorry, was I18N.

You can help them with libraries, e.g. like Java does it:

formatting link

Your website phisystem.net doesn't show much information. The other link mentioned in this thread,

formatting link
doesn't explain any details of the interesting parts, the kernel and the language.

In your other postings you wrote that you want to sell how to books etc., but without any outline how your language and system looks like, and why it is better than to use some Eclipse based IDE with C and Linux or some other OS, not anybody would buy it.

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Reply to
Frank Buss

Thank you.

I have been on the news group, not to advertise but to get feedback from European programmers on i18n issues. It is because the products are not ready to be commercialized that I am asking for "early" feedback. This is so that opinions can be used in the development process and not for fixing problems after a product has gone to market. My frustration has been that people want to know the details about what the products are going to be like and when I give them some details then others come by and read it and start to think the products are ready for sale. I would rather just ask narrow well-focused questions but responders get very impatient because they want to know everything about it and it is not ready to be revealed to the world. The PhiSystem.net website is not even in operation yet but David Brown wanted to know what my future plans were so I told him. Right now, they are just plans and plans take time to implement.

Paul

Reply to
Paul K. McKneely

Thanks for the clarification. I don't want to rush you, my projects takes ages, too, if it is not a client project :-) But in my experience it helps to discuss ideas early. Imagine you're developing a full product for some years, but in the end noboby needs it.

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Frank Buss, fb@frank-buss.de
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Reply to
Frank Buss

Thank You All for the valuable input. All of your input was very instructive. I appologize for mis-understanding or under-appreciating many of your posts. I learned a lot from all of you!

Paul

Reply to
Paul K. McKneely

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