Runes

>The only thing I expect from a locale is a way to change collating
>sequences. This is important since accented characters are not in a
>useful order for most (all?) languages. Lowercase/uppercase-mappings
>are probably not locale-dependend. I don't care much for
>currency-signs, decimal point/comma and similar things.

This is the sticky part. The tables required for handling case
conversion and the isascii(), isnumber() etc. macros take up 3-400k.
Ideally, for each language, a collating table is also needed, and this
will add even more overhead. I am focusing on just the basics for now:
I/O, conversion to/from multibyte and runes, and will worry about this
later. I think the hardest part is going to be regexp()... though
filename globbing will be easy.

These kind of changes require a lot of thought, and affect very many
parts of the system, so I am not going to try to integrate them too
deeply until I have more time. For now, if they help get bitblt and
MADO running in a rune-aware way, I'll be happy.

Another thing that requires a lot of thought is rune input. Asian
language input by itself is easy, but the trick will be to come up
with a system that allows any language to be input from the keyboard.
I have some ideas now, but I'll not air them just yet.
Received on Mon Feb 28 16:14:07 1994