Subject: About Mr YH Xu's article

From: Wei Wang <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 3 Mar 1993 00:03:53 -0500

Hi, dear fellow CCNETters,

I hope I could comment on Mr Xu's original article. But I've deleted the mail,
so I'll try to remember what I can.

> 1.  Input Method
......

> Answers:  No confusion. I say PingYing is most popular because every
>           GB Chinese system is equipped with it and 90% of the total
>           computer users use it as first choice (Not only casual users,
            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
        I don't agree with this. Most (or we can say almost all) machines are
        equipped with QuWei input method too. But you can never say that's the
        most popular input method. Though I don't have the statistics figures,
        but I believe most of the Chinese key-in jobs in main land China is
        done by the damned Wang Ma (WuBiZiXing -- I don't like it!).

......

>           Just for your information, Mr. Zhang Dao-Zheng, a young technical
>           employee in State Department of PRC (also a graduate student of
>           Beijing Aeronautical and Aerospace University ) and a former major
>           contributor to Wang's wu-bi-zi-xin, has registered his patent of
                                                               ^^^^^^^^^^
        Is that a applied patent or registered one? These are two different
        terms.

>           Jian-Fan Wu-bi-zi-xin both in China and in USA. This version of
......

> 2. Library Chinese System and more ...

> >    temporarily. And in a few library systems we need makek use of the whole
> >    64k range of character set and treat ASCII set as its subset and forget
> >    about the confilict and any consequencial compatibility problem. In this
> >    case, the library computer system is specially designed and thus not
> >    much need for compatability ). The Beijing Library (National Library
> >    of China ) use a NEC made system for such kind of job.
>
> >very interesting.  would you please provide more detail about this NEC
> >system: when introduced? the detail of coding they are using?
>
> >this will help for me to understand the NEC business.
>
> >thanks in advance.
>
> >yih
>
>   Answer: When I visited Beijing Library before the end of 1991, I saw many
>          idle terminals (no power, no connection yet) have been put in some
>          reading room since the openning of this new site of the library,
>          I asked staff about the system. They told me that this system
>          is still under construction yet, it is a gift from NEC and the
 Chinese
                                                    ^^^^
        As far as I know, the system is NOT a gift from anybody. The government
        paid for it. Actually, the large Chinese character set was not just
        invented by NEC. It was a draft national standard besides GB2312/80,
        which was often refered to as G0 set. I don't know if the other G1, G2
        G3 sets had become national standards. But they were used in the
        Beijing Library project. They didn't do that just for fun, of course.
        The number of characters used in those books is far beyond what the
        GB2312 can cover. And they have to deal with things like the publica-
        tions from the Hua GuoHeng's reign (Any body remember the second set
        simplified characters published at that time?) Though the time period
        was short, but the publications have to be there for the history. We
        may consider this as an extreme example for setting up a standard too
        casually. That causes a lot of truble for the people who have to deal
        with the standard.

>          character set for this system will be 64k. I have no other direct
>          information except a later newpaper report about its operation. But

......

> 3. Chinese code standard

......

>   This law may be is an administrative law, it is enforced by import/export
         ^^^
        To my knowledge, I'd say there's never been such a law in existance,
        nor an administrative one. People talked about standardizing font
        patterns, but never about the internal coding of Chinese characters.
        Theoretically, the GB2312 is meant to standardize interchange of info-
        mation between systems supporting Chinese. It doesn't deal with
        internal representation of Chinese characters. Actually, people were
        talking about modifying GB2312 or adopting new national standard for
        Chinese character set, when first the TCA code set and then UNICODE got
        attention of the policy makers of China. I see that as a posibility,
        because we all see many contradictions in GB2312. One thing is the
        different character sequencing policies between the class 1 and 2
        characters.

        Back to the law issue, I don't think such a law would make any sense
        in any way. Market has its own rules for the games, right? I don't
        think the guys in Taiwan and Hong Kong can afford not to support GB
        if they want to enter the main land market, simply because it so
        popularly used there.

> departments, the details may be available by calling Chinese consul nearest
> you. It seems to me that this law is primarily used to prohibit the Chinese
> system developed in Taiwan to appear in mainland to avoid a multi-code
> confusion in mainland China. It saves a lot of conversion questions that
> we see every week in CCNET-L. To my understanding, this is not a political
> consideration, nor a pre-mature administrative decision, it is based on a
> desperately needed economic and technical standardnization consideration. The
> standardnization process of Chinese character set system has already past its
> 4th decades and already existed as a accepted satndard for past 12 yeras.
  ^^^^^^^^^^^
        I don't think so. Can you name one who has done Chinese computing on a
        computer in 1953?

......

> 4.  Unicode etc.

......

>  Answer: I have no direct information about what is going in government
>   policy and the activities of standardnization institute. I only heard about
>   Unicode not long time ago and read a MicroSoft document about it yesterday.

        I can tell that the UNICODE and ISO14644(?) have long entered the
        Chinese policy making circle, at least three years ago. Actually China
        is one of the country actively involved in UNICODE beside the US,
        Japan, and South Korea. That also intrigues the discussion about
        modifying GB2312.

>   But we programmers are eagerly waiting for big computer and software
>   providers such as IBM, DEC, HP, Microsoft to support the Unicode (or other
>   Double Byte Character Set, or DBCS )in their standard software in the
 future,
>   not just in the Chinese version of MS-DOS, Chinese version of MS-Windows,
>   etc..... If this is supported, there is no special need of Chinese computing
>   systems. We then can treat Chinese as another font and our greatest
>   programmers in China do not have to spend time in developing so many
>   Chinese sytems, instead, we can spend more time to do application
>   development.  (althoug this will reduce the importance of our jobs. )

        I strongly disagree with what Mr Xu stated in the above section.
        Nobody can afford to wait for such a big event. If China does not
        involve actively in this game, there would be even less share in the
        software market for the Chinese software industry (if we can say there
        is any of them) in the future. UNICODE does Chinese processing a great
        favor since the Chinese people don't have to invent the wheel. But it's
        also a great challenge. If we don't face it actively, we'll lose this
        chance just like we do with chips -- the basic brick for computer
        hardware.

> 5.  Spelling of PinYin, etc.
>
> Thanks for the Chinese-on-DOS info.
> For next time, could you correct your spellings PingYing and ZhuYing to
> PinYin and ZhuYin? (I forgot if there was also a ShuangPing which should
> be ShuangPin). It might confuse some people.
>
>    Answer: Thanks, you are right.
             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

        But you are using the wrong spelling right in this Q&A message.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And I'd like to give my opinion on "compatibility". Mr Xu used this word in
his orginal article many times. But I'd say it's not so appropriate to say
compatible or not with the internal coding of Chinese characters. Compatibility
concerns only the interaction of two systems. And further more, using standard
coding scheme does NOT make one software compatible with the others. It just
make it easier to be compatible. This seems like word game, but actually
compatibility and standardization are two concepts. I've experinced myself of
being restricted to use specific standard, no matter it fitted or not. Say, it
is very hard to use the CCDOS GB coding scheme in a multiple language environ-
ment, which including Latin languages, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and
the traditional Chinese all together. You just have to invent your own wheel,
or you are going to die real hard.

So I'd say what Mr Xu gave us in his orginal article were mostly old craps.
What we need today is probably a real software industry in China. The Chinese
government has to encourage companies, which maybe are not as powerful as
Microsoft, to write software. I don't know how. Maybe just publish a software
protection law is not enough. It has to be enforced. There could be more good
software systems like the FangZheng (HuaGuang) DTP package only after the
industry in China goes into a well-doing up-rising loop. One more important
point is that, we can't do it individually, like we used to do things.

Any comments are welcome. But don't just flame me.

Regards to all.

Wang Wei