> Alex Belits writes:
> > On Fri, 17 Apr 1998, Albert D. Cahalan wrote:
>
> >> Look at it this way:
> >>
> >> We are stuck in a world with multiple character encodings.
> >> To convert, you generally need to go through UCS2.
> >
> > To convert what? We have multiple encodings because we have multiple
> > languages, and conversion through Unicode is useful only within the
> > language because otherwise there will be nothing to map into. koi8-r and
> > iso8859-1 charsets have no common characters except the 7-bit ASCII range.
>
> You have multiple Russian encodings. There are multiple Czech encodings.
> I'm fairly sure most European languages have at least two encodings,
> thanks to Bill Gates and the ISO.
I can think of at least half a dozen encodings for German off the top of
my head. I've implemented most of these in some BBS software I wrote.
> >> The kernel must convert for foreign filesystem support.
> >
> > What filesystems support? Linux is incapable of using
> > read-write currently the most popular filesystem among Unixlike
> > OSes, and no one seems to have problems with that.
Linux can't use NFS or EXT2? That's news to me ...
> SMB, which is getting extensions for better Unix support.
NCPFS. FAT. HPFS. NTFS. HFS. All of these have character set issues.
> > I have never seen users voluntairily using different encodings of the
> > same language on the same OS -- originally multiple encodings for the same
> > languages were created because of incompatible operating systems and
> > hardware.
>
> People share both disk and network filesystems with other OSs.
I'm right now using two different encodings for German on this very
machine: from dosemu, and from the rest of the system.
And then there is the Mac that mounts filesystems ...
MfG Kai
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