i18n

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

On Fri, 17 Mar 2006 21:36:05 -0500
Matej Cepl <ceplm at seznam.cz> wrote:

> a) how much it matters that C when it was originated was US-ASCII only, when
> everybody use some Unicode-aware library like Qt (or whatever is used
> elsewhere)?
Internationalization goes much further than simply using a 3rd party
graphics library. Certainly, today when we are global, an application
is written with a graphical front end and will (or should) be fully
I18N capable. But, in Linux there are over 1500 command line utilities
all of which have some interaction with the user. Most of these are
written in C or C++. But, while the underlying character type in C is
8-bits, there are facilities in standard C and C++ to use wide
characters, or multi-byte characters, which is how UTF-8 implements
character sets that require more than the 255 limit (remember there are
numbers, control characters, cases and punctuation characters too).
C89 introduced I18N to the C language (both to the core
language, but to the run-time library). It was then up to the library
designers to implement these features. As I mentioned earlier, this not
only includes support for character sets, but also support for things
like date and number formatting. For instance, the C language time
functions, such as ctime(3) and strftime(3) display dates and times
based on the locale. So while a programmer could very easily display a
date in mm/dd/yy format, he/she could use the proper conversion in
strftime that would display the date in the locale of the system the
application is running in (eg. dd/mm/yy in a European locale). 

> b) which operating system you use, which is written in Java or any language
> other than C/Objective-C/C++?
The OS is irrelevant. The applications and the support libraries
available are what implements I18N. 
-- 
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
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