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> If you look at the first time this happened, "internationalization",
> you see that it you replace the middle 'n' letters with the number,
> getting I18N. Blame/praise to posix committee members.
> /r$
Richard, where did you learn to count? There are only 3 'n' letters between
the 'i' and the final 'n' in internationalization, so it should be spelled
I3N. Unless you mean the last 'n' to be inclusive, in which case it's I4N.
Just to be clear, I think we need an inclusive count designator, '+', to
handle locale differences. So it's either I3N, or I4N+. However, I don't
like default designators of exclusivity, so we should throw in a '-' to
indicate exclusive 'n' counting. I3N then becomes I3N-.
But why the focus on just the 'n' characters? What about the other letters?
They're all equals (except for 'q')-- we should be counting them all. Thus,
internationalization is properly abbreviated as(according to our forthcoming
Working Draft):
4i4n2t1e1r3a1l1z1o+
in inclusive prefix notation, or:
i3n31t0e0r2a0l0z0o-
in exlusive postfix notation.
Of course, we'll need to add a prefix/postfix operator just to make sure
there's no ambiguity. In order to be economical, let's use a single letter
'p' to indicate both postfix and prefix notation. This sounds confusing, but
in fact is easy to disambiguate by merely noting the position of the 'p': if
it's at the beginning, then it stands for 'prefix' and, if at the end, it
means 'postfix'; so the last two example become:
p4i4n2t1e1r3a1l1z1o+
i3n31t0e0r2a0l0z0o-p
What about whitespace, you ask? Good question: we may want to abbreviate
compound words and phrases in the future, so let's be thorough. For example,
"OK" which actually is an abbreviation (according to some sources) of "Old
Kinderhook" in it's proper, prefix exclusive abbreviated form, would be:
poO\ oK-
As you can see, we merely escape the whitespace character to indicate where
the space should go.
Other areas are still under investigation by the Working Group. A couple of
the questions under examination are:
* Should we allow whitespace collapse?
* What if we want to support words with numbers in them?
Different radix notations will obviously have to be taken into account,
also.
Of course, this will all easily be resolved in the next few months by the 4
editors, 27 authors, and 104 hanger-ons that are in the Working Group. Many
hands make light work.
Sincerely,
J1e1f2\ L1o1w1e1r1y1+p
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