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Postings from June 2001
> Firstly, the JIS standard defines, along with the ordering and > enumeration of its characters, their glyph shape. Unicode, on the other > hand does not. This means that as far as Unicode is concerned, there is > literally no distinction between two distinct shapes and hence no way to > specify which should be used. This becomes particularly> emotive when one > is, for instance, attempting to represent a person's name - > if they have a particular preferred variant character with which they write their > name, there is no way to communicate that to the computer, and > information is lost. This is a very common practice, nothing to surprise. As you can tell, my name is "hong zhang", which already lost "chinese tone" and "glyph". "hong" has 4 tones, each tone can be any of several characters, each character can be one of several glyphs (simplified and tranditional). However, it does not really matter to still call it my name. > The second objection is again related to character versus glyph issues: > since Chinese, I think this problem =~ locale. For any unicode character, you can not properly tell its lower case or upper case without considering locale. And unicode does not encode locale. > Finally, there is a historiographical issue; when computers are used to > digitise and store historical literature containing archaic characters, > specifying the exact variant character becomes an important > consideration. I believe this should be handled by application. This kind of work is needed by research. Perl should not care about it. Hong