Why UTF-8/16 character encodings?

[Simen Kjaeraas]

On Thu, 30 May 2013 11:36:42 +0200, monarch_dodra <monarchdodra at gmail.com>  
wrote:

> On Wednesday, 29 May 2013 at 22:42:08 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 5/29/2013 3:26 AM, qznc wrote:
>>> Once I heared an argument from developers working for banks. They coded
>>> business-specific stuff in Java. Business-specific meant financial  
>>> concepts with
>>> german names (e.g. Vermögen,Bürgschaft), which sometimes include äöüß.  
>>> Some of
>>> those concept had no good translation into english, because they are  
>>> not used
>>> outside of Germany and the clients prefer the actual names anyways.
>>
>> German is pretty easy to do in ASCII: Vermoegen and Buergschaft
>
> What about Chinese? Russian? Japanese? It is doable, but I can tell you  
> for a fact that they very much don't like reading it that way.
>
> You know, having done programming in Japan, I know that a lot of devs  
> simply don't care for english, and they'd really enjoy just being able  
> to code in Japanese. I can't speak for the other countries, but I'm sure  
> that large but not spread out countries like China would also just  
> *love* to be able to code in 100% Madarin (I'd say they wouldn't care  
> much for English either).
>
> I think this possibility is actually a brilliant feature that could help  
> popularize the language oversees, especially in teaching courses, or the  
> private sector. Why not turn down a feature that makes us popular?
>
> As for research/university, I think they are already global enough to  
> stick to English anyways.
>
> No matter how I see it, I can only see benefits to keeping it, and  
> downsides to turning it down.

Now if only we had the C preprocessor:

#define 如果 if
#define 直到 while

(Note: this is what Google Translate told me was good. I do not speak,
read or otherwise understand chinese)

-- 
Simen