i18n

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

Most commercial Unix systems were internationalized a number of years ago. I 
know that back in 1994/1995 time frame, when I was maintaining lint(1) on 
Tru64 Unix (actually OSF/1 at that time), I made a number of changes to the 
messages. We used a message catalog, and when we made changes the messages 
had to be translated to a number of languages. We had an I18N group to do 
that. 

The problem with Unix/Linux is that it is still based on 8-bit characters, 
and an internationalized program must be set up to use either 16-bit or 
wider. Java was written where it's native character type is 16-bits which 
is sufficient for a majority of languages, but not for Asian languages.
-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9