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From: Erik M. van der Poel <erik@sra.co.jp>
To: wg15rin@dkuug.dk
Subject: Re: symbolic names in localedef
Date: Mon, 22 Apr 91 21:19:03 +0900
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Greger writes:
> (It means that you can port an "ASCII" localedef source
> or charmap to e.g. EBCDIC rather easily). When you use a character in
> "itself", localedef can assume that the encoding is the default one;
> with a symbolic name that can never be a problem.

Well, yes, I can sort of understand your point of view, but what if
you reasoned like this:

Starting from an extreme -- I should not put Kanji in my localedef
source since my European colleague may not be able to display it on
his/her terminal. So I should limit myself to the POSIX portable
characters.

Taking it one step further, I should not use any of the ISO 646
variable characters, since they may look different on someone else's
terminal, and that may be confusing. So I should limit myself to the
ISO 646 invariant set.

But even if I stick to the 646 invariant characters, the source itself
will be encoding dependent. I'd probably write it in ASCII, but if I
send it via email to my IBM colleague, it'll probably get converted to
EBCDIC. But this is not a problem, since it'll still have the same
meaning if it is converted to EBCDIC. So it would seem that you don't
really need the symbolic names for the 646 invariant characters, since
the symbolic names themselves (including the angle brackets <>) will
be in a certain code anyway. I hope you can understand what I'm
*trying* to say! :-)

One of my concerns is that certain localedef definitions become
utterly unreadable when you adhere strictly to symbolic names:

For example,

	"<percent-sign><m><slash><percent-sign><d>"

instead of

	"%m/%d"

What do you think?


Regards,
Erik