Re: [PATCH] fix new format when printing multiple lines

[Reuben Thomas]

On 23 December 2013 22:24, Karl Berry <address@hidden> wrote:

> Personally, I feel this new functionality goes beyond the intended
> purpose of hello.  It is not supposed to be a primer in programming.
> It is supposed to be an example of using basic GNU infrastructure.
> The simpler the code, the better.
>

Note that the original purpose of the change was to do something encouraged
in GNU documentation, namely to lift an arbitrary restriction of hello,
which was that new-style (boxed) greetings could not be combined with
user-supplied text.

Given that is a good goal, the subject of Unicode must be addressed, since
user-defined text may always be in Unicode. (Indeed, even built-in text is,
and the boxed format should surely be internationalised).

I don't see a way around this; nor do I think Unicode should be thought of
something that is a "specific programming feature": multi-byte encodings
are the commonest way of dealing with internationalised text, and treating
them as a bolt-on extra automatically disenfranchises all the communities
that need them for their languages, which these days, given the demise of
8-bit encodings, is pretty much anything other than English.

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