From rinehuls@access.digex.net Thu Jan 8 22:25:23 1998 Received: from access5.digex.net (qlrhmEbBUV1EY@access5.digex.net [205.197.245.196]) by dkuug.dk (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id WAA11148 for ; Thu, 8 Jan 1998 22:25:12 +0100 Received: from localhost (rinehuls@localhost) by access5.digex.net (8.8.4/8.8.4) with SMTP id QAA06094 for ; Thu, 8 Jan 1998 16:25:05 -0500 (EST) Date: Thu, 8 Jan 1998 16:25:05 -0500 (EST) From: "william c. rinehuls" Reply-To: "william c. rinehuls" To: sc22docs@dkuug.dk Subject: SC22 N2645 - SC22 Contribution to CAW Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII _________________ beginning of title page ____________________________ ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22 Programming languages, their environments and system software interfaces Secretariat: U.S.A. (ANSI) ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22 N2645 TITLE: JTC 1/SC22 Contribution to the Workshop on Cultural Adaptability DATE ASSIGNED: 1998-01-08 SOURCE: Secretariat, ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22 BACKWARD POINTER: N/A DOCUMENT TYPE: SC22 Contribution PROJECT NUMBER: N/A STATUS: The Secretariat has forwarded this contribution to the Workshop convener. ACTION IDENTIFIER: FYI DUE DATE: N/A DISTRIBUTION: Text CROSS REFERENCE: SC22 N2574 (res 97-17, 97-18 and 97-19) DISTRIBUTION FORM: Open Address reply to: ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC22 Secretariat William C. Rinehuls 8457 Rushing Creek Court Springfield, VA 22153 USA Telephone: +1 (703) 912-9680 Fax: +1 (703) 912-2973 email: rinehuls@access.digex.net ___________ end of title page; beginning of contribution _______________ JTC 1/SC22 Contribution to the Workshop on Cultural Adaptability SC22 has been developing standards and technical reports which include provisions to facilitate the cultural adaptability of applications for more than a decade. In recognition of the importance of this work, SC22 established its WG20, Internationalization, in 1990, to develop the work item "Functionality for internationalization of applications", which had recently been approved by JTC 1. Prior to this, a number of SC22's projects, including POSIX and several of the programming languages, such C and COBOL, had provided some capabilities to support internationalization and localization. As a result of the NP approved in 1990, SC22 has developed the TR 11017 "Framework for Internationalization", which sets forward a model for Cultural Adaptability. The process for cultural adaptability is to first remove all cultural dependencies from the programming source text in an application, and move these cultural dependencies into data specifications that can be accessed via functions/APIs. Some of the benefits of this model is: - the application will only have one program source eliminating the need to maintain different source versions of the application. - the application will only need to be available as one binary per platform, and the introduction of a new version of the application can then be done in many markets at the same time. - an application can rely on cultural data that has been proven to work according to cultural expectations with other applications - An application does not need to provide itself the cultural conventions for a whole set of environments. SC22 is now developing standards to support this model: - a standard specifying the format to describe the cultural data, including default data, ISO/IEC 14652, currently at FCD stage. - A standard for sorting, ISO/IEC 14651 currently at FCD stage, including a template for sorting all characters of UCS and APIs to handle this. - a standard for accessing the cultural data via APIs, ISO/IEC 15435, currently at WD stage. In addition, a standard for registering cultural conventions, is being fasttracked in JTC 1 as ISO/IEC 15897. With this set of standards an application can be fully internationalized using standard APIs to access standard internationalization data, via references to standardized names. SC22 believes the model established in TR 11017 and the standards which support the model are applicable to a broad class of standards being developed within JTC 1. In order to ensure appropriate implementation of cultural adaptability in JTC 1 standards, SC22 advocates that: 1) JTC 1 directives address the requirement for cultural adaptability, in a manner similar to that of 10.5, Application Portability (in JTC 1 N 3348). The following is possible wording: "10.6 Cultural Adaptability In order to facilitate the cultural adaptability of applications using JTC 1 standards, each standard shall be developed with consideration given to - the requirements and issues of cultural adaptability and - the requirements and issues of interoperability of cultural adaptability with other relevant JTC 1 standards." 2) Form 3, Proposal for a New Work Item, be modified to address the requirements for cultural adaptability. The following is possible wording under "Purpose and Justification": " b) The requirements and objectives of the standardization activity with respect to cultural adaptability. If there are none, this should be indicated. " 3) NP Acceptance Criteria be modified. The following is possible wording under "Business Relevance, A.1" as a second paragraph: "Specific attention shall be given to the requirements of cultural adaptability and the interoperability of cultural adaptability with other relevant JTC 1 standards." 4) Each JTC 1 subcommittee assume responsibility for ensuring appropriate assessment of cultural adaptability requirements for project subdivisions by addressing this annually in project business plans. 5) An email reflector be established for communication between all groups involved in cultural adaptability (the SC22/WG20 convener, Arnold Winkler, is a good source for identifying such groups). Placement of SC22WG20 in JTC 1 SC22 sees the process of making cultural adaptability standards as the following: 1. Gathering a lot of cultural information from a widespread area of issues, for example: characters, character attributes, sorting, time and date conventions, monetary conventions, spelling, hyphenation, postal formats, paper sizes, titulation of persons, keyboards, input methods, fonts, and terminology. 2. Generalize these, finding the commonality and diversity in each of the areas, and describing it in a form that can be used in an IT environment. 3. Describe specification formats and APIs that can support the diversity of the cultural conventions in each area. As applications are inherently written in one (or more) specific programming language, each programming language needs APIs to support cultural adaptability. Development of each of the programming language standards in the cultural adaptability area may easily lead to specifications that behave differently from a users perspective, when handling the same problems. Users would expect uniform behavior with respect to cultural conventions across applications on the same platform, and also across platforms. To achieve this goal it is necessary to have strong coordination between the programming languages, possibly via development of a programming language independent API, with bindings for each individual language. The set of APIs should be developed in close cooperation with each of the programming language groups, as some of the data types, e.g.. strings, are fundamental data types of each language and thus has impact on the core language definition. In this way, a common specification format for the cultural data can be exploited for all programming languages. For the data to be well accessible via APIs, the data specifications formats should be developed together with the APIs. Each cultural convention area should be accessible through a general access method so the set of APIs for each of the cultural areas should be developed together. SC22 thus sees the writing cultural adaptability standards as a process gathering cultural processing requirements from many diverse fields, systemizing and making them into an information technology handleable specification, which then in close cooperation with the programming language developing WGs can be incorporated in the programming languages. The relation to SC22 work is thus very tight as the target of the cultural adaptability standards, while there are a number of relations on the information input side to other JTC 1 SCs and ISO TCs outside JTC 1, such as terminology, sorting, document handling, banking, postal addressing etc. In some areas, such as character string handling, the functionality is affecting the core of each programming language. The best way to secure the strong interaction with programming language standards development is to keep the cultural adaptability standardization of JTC 1 within SC22. _____________________ end of SC22 N2645 _____________________________