Re: Localized braille (Was: Gnopernicus and ISO-Latin2 characters)

[Bill Haneman <Bill Haneman Sun COM>]

Samuel Thibault wrote:

> > Concerning the dependencies of a common transcription library, I am 
> > afraid it would be difficult to do without glib: there are few good 
> > portable libraries that I know which can handle unicode (IBM ICU, Apache 
> > apr, Qt...)  and glib is one of the most complete and IMHO one of the 
> > most commonly found on a standard Linux installation.
> >    
>
> We're not only talking about Linux. And the C language has all the
> unicode tools that are needed for the low-level translation library:
> it should accept wchar_t * strings and output unsigned char * strings
> (encoded in ISO/TR 11548-1 coding), or wchar_t * strings using the
> U+2800 unicode row. And iconv (posix XOPEN extension) can be used for
> converting from/to UTF-8 braille table files, there is no _real_ need
> for glib for that.
>  
Samuel, I disagree.  The standard C libraries do not include any unicode 
translation or processing tools, and those are critical for braille 
internationalization.  iconv() alone is not sufficient.  In order to do 
reasonable i18n work, one needs to be able to do string-to-character 
offset conversions, determine the type of a unicode character, perform 
collation, etc.  This is what the glib unicode libraries do for us, and 
we certainly do not want to re-implement an entire unicode/utf8 
processing library.

If C has all we need, then why do these other libraries exist? (i.e. 
ICU, Apache apr, Qt's unicode methods, glib's g_unichar/g_utf8 code, etc.).

Bill

> Regards,
> Samuel
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