On Fri, 25 Mar 2005 19:09:09 -0500, Peter T. Daniels
<grammatim@...> wrote:

> I have no idea what you're talking about. Nicholas began a discussion of
> ...

> ... i18n, which means nothing to me

I'm, well, astonished. Apparently you are not involved at all in any work
on making computers work with other writing systems. I guess that's fair,
and perhaps understandable, considering recent discussions. It also seems
believable that you don't read at all, or very little, on that topic. I
guess that's fair, too. Lots of people could be so described.

Sooner or later, one will find, well into adulthood, that one has not
learned some specific thing that almost everybody else knows. ("Misled",
anyone?)

OK, the word "internationalization" is long and a nuisance to type often.
That word has 20 letters. Combining whimsy and practicality, as I see it,
the embedded "18" represents the 18 letters that are not typed. L10n (l
ocali zatio n) and (only recently?), g11n (g lobal i zatio n) also show up
sometimes. (I split the words to make counting easier.) Split: i ntern
ation aliza tio n (Egad! I thought modern automatic hyphenation,
*anywhere* in a word, was bad. This splitting by five letters (max.) looks
even worse!)

I have heard that DEC (Digital Eqpt. Corp.), long before the merger, had
developed a very good hyphenation system. They also developed an excellent
speech synthesizer, so good that the remaining discrepancy was slightly
inappropriate emotional content.

I think, btw, that Tex Texin is "i18n guy". (Is he still reading Qalam? I
remember some very pleasant messages from him a while back.)
Wonder why he omitted Alan Wood's Unicode pages?

Regards,

--
Nicholas Bodley /*|*\ Waltham, Mass.
The curious hermit -- autodidact and polymath