Re: I'm not surprised most commenters against Unicode are anglophones
Better to discourage programmers from manipulating text at all. Once you allow programmers to treat human-readable text as chunks of "wordlets", you're asking for the pain of this:
snprintf(buf,len,"%d item%s", count, (count==1)?"":"s");
and this:*
snprintf(buf,len,"%d item%s %s%s.", count, (count==1)?"":"s"
,type==DLOAD?"download":"updat" iscomplete?"ed":"ing");
A brief overview of how Slavic languages handle pluralisation usually does the trick to dissuade practitioners of #1; those who'd describe #2 as "efficient" would take a lot more work ("but I'll just use whatever the Japanese for 'ing' is and it'll still be fine...") .
The best way ways around these is to leave the job of writing text to linguists, and limit the job of the software to simply choosing between complete sentences; or better - complete paragraphs.
* both of those examples are culled from real code, by the way. A long time ago I used to work with development teams to make their products localisable... most needed only a little work, some were really bad. Perversely, I'd find that the higher the number of non-native English speakers on the team, the harder the software was to localise into a non-English language.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
