escalator
Last updated at 9:29 am UTC on 23 December 2005
From: agree@carltonfields.com
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1999 16:59:53 -0400
Subject: RE: Unicode support
summarized
Question
Why is the failure in a general purpose class to include protocol for an artificial intelligence capable of picking apart German multi-words not a failure of design?
Answer
The String type in Squeak isn't capable of English language typography, yet it is highly usable nevertheless. It provides no word-semantics (except for the spelling support). Certainly no one can responsibly say it is useless for English language work.
It is, of course, a fair criticism that ASCII cannot support most of the real needs for foreign languages, but this is not
to say that a generalized character representation and its string container object needs to do more for those foreign language than ASCII strings do for English.
By the way, English ALSO has colocations of words, which are semantically meaningless when taken solely as word tokens, yet noone seriously is suggesting that the String class must or even should look up words in a dictionary for colocations before tokenization.
