"Unicode of Death"

[Christopher Fynn]

Perhaps there should be a "tounge in cheek" emoji to indicate this


On 30 May 2015 at 04:50, Andrew Cunningham <lang.support at gmail.com> wrote:

> Geez Philippe,
>
> It was tounge in cheek.
>
> A.
>
>
> On Saturday, 30 May 2015, Philippe Verdy <verdy_p at wanadoo.fr> wrote:
> >
> > 2015-05-28 23:36 GMT+02:00 Andrew Cunningham <lang.support at gmail.com>:
> >>
> >> Not the first time unicode crashes things. There was the google chrome
> bug on osx that crashed the tab for any syriac text.
> >
> > "Unicode crashes things"? Unicode has nothing to do in those crashes
> caused by bugs in applications that make incorrect assumptions (in fact not
> even related to characters themselves but to the supposed behavior of the
> layout engine. Programmers and designers for example VERY frequently forget
> the constraints for RTL languages and make incorrect assumptions about left
> and right sides when sizing objects, or they don't expect that the cursor
> will advance backward and forget that some measurements can be negative: if
> they use this negative value to compute the size of a bitmap redering
> surface, they'll get out of memory, unchecked null pointers returned, then
> they will crash assuming the buffer was effectively allocated.
> > These are the same kind of bugs as with the too common buffer overruns
> with unchecked assumtions: the code is kept because "it works as is" in
> their limited immediate tests.
> > Producing full coverage tests is a difficult and lengthy task, that
> programmers not always have the time to do, when they are urged to produce
> a workable solution for some clients and then given no time to improve the
> code before the same code is distributed to a wider range of clients.
> > Commercial staffs do that frequently, they can't even read the technical
> limitations even when they are documented by programmers... in addition the
> commercial staff like selling softwares that will cause customers to ask
> for support... that will be billed ! After that, programmers are
> overwhelmed by bug reports and support requests, and have even less time to
> design other thigs that they are working on and still have to produce. QA
> tools may help programmers in this case by providing statistics about the
> effective costs of producing new software with better quality, and the cost
> of supporting it when it contains too many bugs: commercial teams like
> those statistics because they can convert them to costs, commercial
> margins, and billing rates. (When such QA tools are not used, programmers
> will rapidly leave the place, they are fed up by the growing pressure to do
> always more in the same time, with also a growing number of "urgent"
> support requests.).
> > Those that say "Unicode crashes things" do the same thing: they make
> broad unchecked assumptions about how things are really made or how things
> are actually working.
> >
>
> --
> Andrew Cunningham
> Project Manager, Research and Development
> (Social and Digital Inclusion)
> Public Libraries and Community Engagement
> State Library of Victoria
> 328 Swanston Street
> Melbourne VIC 3000
> Australia
>
> Ph: +61-3-8664-7430
> Mobile: 0459 806 589
> Email: acunningham at slv.vic.gov.au
>           lang.support at gmail.com
>
> http://www.openroad.net.au/
> http://www.mylanguage.gov.au/
> http://www.slv.vic.gov.au/
>
>
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