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From: "Olivier DUBUISSON" <Olivier.Dubuisson@f...> > But AFAIK nobody has ever produced a national version of ASN.1, probably > for the good reason that he/she would have to implement the associated > tool! Actually the same story goes with most programming languages, doesn't > it? Until the mid-90s! It has been my major task to promote "native language markup" as a fundamental issue of internationalization. XML has it now, SGML allows it, and the ISO guide on programming languages (when I last saw it) recommends it. I believe it is common for databases to support native-language fields, for file systems to support native language file and directory names, and for scripting and programming languages to allow native-language variables. There is even a Unicode Consortium technical report giving the details of which characters are best. Technology that does not allow direct expression of local concepts is discriminatory. It disables people with poor expressiveness in Latin-script languages from programming. It provides an extra layer of hindrance that acts to perpetuate the centre-peripheral technological world we have now. It presumes that all words we want to use have an adequate or standardized and recognizable romanization: if a Hong Kong person romanizes a character should they use Mandarin or Cantonese phonetical transcription? In some countries, the technological elite uses English and is happy with the status quo. In other countries, even the technological elite is not comfortable in English. I would hope that Japan and other ISO members would start to adopt a policy of diverting all International Standards to Technical Report status if they are gratuitously tied to ASCII rather than to Unicode. It is shameful. With SGML, it was quite easy to get native language markup features added, because there already was a user requirement at ISO that SGML should have no bias towards particular native languages. It seems that the standard keywords to a language can be Latin only (e.g. minimum literals in ASCII), but anything that requires description of objects in the real world should be open to any language and script. ASN.1 could not claim to be as useful as XML without it. Cheers Rick
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