ex5.utf (1505B)
1 .tr -\(hy 2 .TL 3 Hello World 4 .br 5 or 6 .br 7 Καλημέρα κόσμε 8 .br 9 or 10 .br 11 こんにちは 世界 12 .AU 13 Rob Pike 14 Ken Thompson 15 .AI 16 .MH 17 .AB 18 Plan 9 from Bell Labs has recently been converted from ASCII 19 to an ASCII-compatible variant of Unicode, a 16-bit character set. 20 In this paper we explain the reasons for the change, 21 describe the character set and representation we chose, 22 and present the programming models and software changes 23 that support the new text format. 24 Although we stopped short of full internationalization\(emfor 25 example, system error messages are in Unixese, not Japanese\(emwe 26 believe Plan 9 is the first system to treat the representation 27 of all major languages on a uniform, equal footing throughout all its 28 software. 29 .AE 30 .SH 31 Introduction 32 .PP 33 The world is multilingual but most computer systems 34 are based on English and ASCII or worse. 35 The pending release of Plan 9 [Pike90], a new distributed operating 36 system from Bell Laboratories, seemed a good occasion 37 to correct this chauvinism. 38 It is easier to make such deep changes when building new systems than 39 by retrofitting old ones. 40 .PP 41 The ANSI C standard [ANSIC] contains some guidance on the matter of 42 `wide' and `multi-byte' characters but falls far short of 43 solving the myriad associated problems. 44 We could find no literature on how to convert a 45 .I system 46 to larger character sets, although some individual 47 .I programs 48 have been converted. 49 This paper reports what we discovered as we 50 explored the problem of representing multilingual