Japanese and Unicode

[NIIBE Yutaka <gniibe@etl.go.jp>]

Hello, 

Sorry for late response.  I just came back from Boston.

As you said, JIS-X-0208 and JIS-X-0212 can both be mapped to Unicode.
Therefore, if we use Japanese with Japanese Kana-Kanji Script, we can
adopt Unicode.  But it's not multilingual text, IMHO.

I think that the main reason why Japanese programmers dislike Unicode
is historical one around ISO 10646-1, more specifically, CJK
unification.  Some Japanese think that distinction of Chinese
character in Chinese script and the one in Japanese script is
important, as well as Alpha in Greek and "A".  (Note that some Chinese
think that all Chinese characteter is same regardless of script.)

Yes, as Per said, it can be solved in "application string".

Right now, I'm trying to be rational for Unicode.  I've read the paper
of Plan 9 and bought Unicode 2.0 book.  I think that UTF-8 has good in
terms of encoding, and Unicode 2.0 book is really great in terms of
multilingual survey.  In the book, many characters are listed, many
cases around multilingual text are figured, that's great.

However, (currently) I'm not sure that Unicode is the solution for
multilingual text handling.

I think that we should think again about the properties of ASCII
character and its text handling, and we should retain the good
properties of it in enhanced coded character set(s) as possible.

Frankly, I don't understand well with no specific implementation.
Currently, I have a plan to implement multilingual console (possibly
in Guile) which handles mixture of directions (left to right, right to
left, top to bottom, and bottom to top).  This experience may
enlighten me.

I don't think it's problematic when Guile will adopt Unicode.  But I
don't understand the benefits well, if it doesn't solve the problem.

Thanks, 
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