The concept of an internal character set has the crucial weakness---unless full Unicode is used---that it does not address the requirement that substrings from another language having diffferent requirrements must be supported.
I received an email in French this morning that contained the English text [The White Knight] . . . was thinking of a plan To dye one’s whiskers green And then to wear so large a fan That they could not be seen. My colleague had just encountered Lewis Carroll in English---Improbably, there are superb, insulating French translations---and he wanted to share his discovery with me. This is a tractable case; but there are also requirements to embed, say, Arabic or Hebrew text, written from right to left, in Danish text, written from left to right. There is probably no escape from the ugly device of <shift in> ||<descriptor> ||<foreign text> ||<shift out>. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
