I think of myself as a developer. Everything I do these days is
in-house,
and has absolutely no need of unicode. The most recent thing I worked
on
for others is Navigator, and no one has ever asked me for a unicode
version
of that. The last app I worked on before that has been selling for the
past
12 years or so, internationally, and no one has asked for a unicode
version
of that. Maybe I'm unique, but for my personal use cases, unicode is
irrelevant, and given the opportunity costs and performance hits, a
negative.
Not unique perhaps, but 'fortunate'?
Whether or not your application's use unicode directly is not the issue
- beyond direct localization of your interface, a lot of strings come
into your app from outside sources which you cannot control (of course
this largely depends on the target of the app - I guess in-house might
be slight more controllable).
If you have an app that processes arbitrary files on disk, then unless
you are going to limit your users to Western European languages in their
choice of filenames then you need unicode (can you really control the
filenames end users might want to use)?
If you have an app that is customized by user's personal details, then
unless you are going to force your users to only use Western European
characters for their name, address etc, then you need unicode.
If you have an app that uses the system date format, then unless you are
going to force your users to only use a Western European locale setting,
then you need unicode.
Ultimately anyone who is writing apps for any platform and intends to
distribute them widely (whether localized or not) really does need
Unicode support - if only to ensure that any edge-cases (such as unicode
containing filenames, unicode containing locales and such) don't cause
your app to break.
--
Mark Waddingham ~ m...@livecode.com ~ http://www.livecode.com/
LiveCode: Everyone can create apps
_______________________________________________
use-livecode mailing list
use-livecode@lists.runrev.com
Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription
preferences:
http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
