In <200205051529(_dot_)g45FTYg26827(_at_)astro(_dot_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu>
Keith Moore <moore(_at_)cs(_dot_)utk(_dot_)edu> writes:
Do you really think Bill Gates is going to lower himself to using code
written by somebody else? No, he will cut his own and get it wrong
(probably deliberately) :-( .
what we think Bill Gates will or will not do is not a sane basis for
making a technical decision on a standard.
What do you think the smiley was there for?
Sadly, however, what Bill Gates does will have more effect than what we
write in any standard :-( .
Another smiley, in case you didn't notice.
do you really think that OS vendors are going to rewrite *every* form
of input (not just keyboard drivers but copy-and-paste, files downloaded
from the net, etc) to do normalization? if they did, it would break
far more things than it would fix.
The idea is that non-normalized stuff will never exist in files, displays
to be copied/pasted, and the like simply because all such material
ultimately derives from something that was keyed in on a normalizing
keyboard.
A risky strategy? Perhaps, but good enough for many non-critical
applications (critical applications would check, of course). The plain
fact of the matter is that writers of "ordinary" programs will not want to
bother with normalization (they will just expect utilities like 'tolower'
and 'strcmp' to do the Right Thing). And if ever they did try to do the
normalization, they would likely get it wrong anyway :-( .
--
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
Tel: +44 161 436 6131 Fax: +44 161 436 6133 Web: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl
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