Introducing UTF-Random — Making Unicode Fair
Geneva, Switzerland — Unicode revolutionized the written word, but it has one downside: It favors Roman languages by making the byte string representation of other scripts (Cyrillic, Greek, Asian scripts) longer than necessary.
To address this issue, a team of linguists and computer scientists has developed UTF-Random. The key innovation is the use of a probabilistic algorithm (/dev/random), which assigns a bit field to every newly created text file.
Early tests have shown promising results. For example, a Cyrillic character that previously required three bytes in UTF-8 encoding can now be represented with fewer bytes 33.33% of the time (repeating, of course).
What can you do with UTF-Random?
In today’s interconnected world, language diversity should not be a roadblock for software accessibility. GUI applications and documentation can be translated easily, but what about CLIs?
The “POSIX Language Division” is working on internationalizing the command line.
This backward-compatible system consists of a wrapper library in C, tightly integrated with GNU gettext and POSIX locales. After converting a CLI app, the user can effortlessly alias the command with an option like --use-locale=es_ES. Then, every call will expect flags in the provided language.
A fallback to the base language is possible by prefixing a flag with three @ symbols. For example: grep --@@@ignore-case.
Naturally, grep doesn’t need translation. It is the only word that transcends all language barriers.
Technical details
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Closing thoughts
Kvankam la vivo certe estas serio de karakteroj, al nia universo mankas enigkesto.
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