Re: [li18nux2000:62] Comments on locale name guideline

[Pablo Saratxaga <pablo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Kaixo!

On Wed, Jun 13, 2001 at 03:02:44PM +0200, Bruno Haible wrote:

> > 7. For the CODESET repertoire, please add the specials : ( ) / _ . *
> 
> No, please don't add : ( ) / . * as these may not occur in charset
> names according to RFC 2278.

'/' cannot even happen in a file name.

Those may be useful for a large and comprehensive repertory of existing
encodings in Earth, with the possibility of keep trace of the changes (in 
time and from different sources), etc.

But that is most useless for a practical purpose of using a charset or a
set of charset in an operating system.
The total number of choices will be much more limited on an OS, simply
because it doesn't have any utility to have support for ones that are not
used (either because the charset has been superseded with another, or because
there are charsets that are private and restricted to some other systems.
For example it makes no point having support for mac-roman at locale
level for a Unix like system; that encoding is only used in MacOS)
 
> This is BS. The "euro" modifier designates locales with a different
> contents for LC_MONETARY. It doesn't require special coding in the
> applications.

I think maybe he actually meant a special charset.
Well, it's true that for 8bit encoding often the non-euro are iso-8859-1
while the euro ones are iso-8859-15; that is simply because iso-8859-1
doesn't have the euro sign. But for UTF-8 locales a distinction between
them still stands.

Well, in the case of the @euro, they are destined to disappear soon.
But there are variants that will still be very much used:

- dictinction between modern/traditional sorting orders (several languages
  have that)
- use of ascii or native digits (arabic script locales and indic script locales
  may be interested in this)
- telling the script used for languages that can use several scripts
  (latin/cyrillic, latin/arabic, devanagari/arabic)

-- 
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga

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