- From: Carl W. Brown <cbrown@xnetinc.com>
- Date: Thu, 16 Aug 2001 19:13:41 -0700
- To: <www-international@w3.org>
Andrea, You are right about a lot of Java applications. Many of them I suspect are written because it is easier to develop cross platform code than in C/C++ and not necessarily for the i18n values. What I am addressing is the existing C/C++ code that people want to internationalize. There are also people who prefer to also develop new applications in C/++ as well. This is very useful for applications that have been MBCS enabled where that have added their own MBCS support. Replacing it with Unicode support becomes very easy. The reference to Apache problems was mine. I think that you are too ladylike to point out problems with the competition's designs. ;-} I figured out that this is code that I had to maintain to make it faster to implement ICU for my clients. By making it open source people can either contact me because I wrote it, or use it themselves in which case I would not have gotten the business anyway. In either case we will have more Unicode implementations which will make all of our lives easier. Until ICU 1.5 I had to fix a lot of ICU code to make it really work properly. Now it is a very solid product. Your bottom line hit me - EXPERIMENTATION. Too much of this is just experience. Much of that is trial and error. I think this is because it is not so much a matter of knowing the answers but one of knowing the questions. My code gives people a frame of reference that they can start from. For example I implement xiua_strcmp where I compare all Unicode strings in Unicode code point order. It the user is transforming Unicode from one from say UTF-8 to UTF-16, sorting sequences may matter. They can like the idea or not. If they don't they can take it out. However, at least they think about the issue. Just as valuable is the test code. All i18n support modules should be unit tested. It is too difficult to test the support through the application. Carl
Received on Thursday, 16 August 2001 22:13:54 UTC