At 1:52 AM -0700 2004-08-31, David Syphers wrote: >> Think French. Gauche and Droite. [0] >> Does hard-coding "g" and "d" into the program make any more sense > > No, unfortunately, because on QWERTY "d" is to the left of "g". Same problem > as with "r" and "l". Uhh, you haven't seen French keyboards, have you? They don't use QWERTY. They use AZERTY -- Although I can't recall off the top of my head where "d" and "g" fall on the layout. For that matter, Swiss French keyboards are slightly different from Belgian/French French keyboards. I've gone through four or five different keyboards on this damn laptop I'm using at the moment, including Swiss French, Belgian/French French, German QWERTZU, and I don't remember what all else. Trust me, they're all slightly different. For some of them, if you want to type numbers, you have to hold down a function key and then hit one of the keys on the top row which are otherwise reserved for other characters/character modifiers which are not typically found within the English/Roman alphabet. Now imagine what happens when you start talking about Slavic languages which have some characters that I imagine almost no American or native English-speaker in Europe has ever seen. Or the middle eastern languages like Farsi. Or Hebrew. Or Hindi. Or the three different written versions of Japanese. Or Chinese. Things get really interesting when you start talking about ideograph-based languages for which an adult might be expected to remember 5000-8000 different unique characters, and for which keyboards might have 200 or more keys. So, when talking about these issues, you not only need to think about language, but also keyboard layouts. If you're going to be serious about proposing alternatives, you need to address those issues as well as others. And you need to be willing to come up with the necessary internationalization infrastructure to deal with all the possible permutations and combinations. Or, you can decide to just live with what is hard-coded into the current version of the program. > Mmm... I think we're about ready for chat_at_ here... That was kind of my point. I was being sarcastic, but I guess that didn't come through. -- Brad Knowles, <brad_at_stop.mail-abuse.org> "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755 SAGE member since 1995. See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.Received on Tue Aug 31 2004 - 11:44:08 UTC
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