@Solar:
Well, breaking down posts definitely seems like the cool thing to do here.
As a civilized and socialized being, it should be your obligation to keep on the nice side of any person as long as that person does not give you reason to do otherwise. Whether or not that person is a "foreigner" doesn't come into it. (I'd like to hear your definition of "foreigner", if only because I'm curious how many rules of basic political correctness you would violate in a single statement.)
As far as I know, I've got no obligations to any person or civilization, much less one I doubt I'll ever meet or be a part of. Secondly, to define foreigner, I mean anyone not in the United States, which I thought you would have known unless you were curious as to my nationality. In case you haven't realized, "political correctness" is an overrated fad that simply gives people an excuse to act like little white(no, there aren't any implications behind this) knights on the internet and on television.
Personally I feel that aiming for a functionality level about on-par with DOS 3.3 to be pretty low standards even - no, especially - for a hobby project.
Where did I mention DOS 3.3? Judging by your (massive, seriously) post count, I would think you'd know by now that the type of character encoding has nothing to do with the capabilities of the operating system. Perhaps by not bothering about which is the most politically correct or all-encompassing standard to align myself with, I can, you know, work on an operating system.
No, sorry - ASCII has never "worked", has always been the reason for needless headaches, which is why something like Unicode popped up in the first place.
I fail to see how ASCII (a fixed-width, single-language encoding, with 256 (128, excluding the higher half) characters) is more of a headache than Unicode (a variable-width(sometimes), multi-language encoding, with (as of yet) over 100,000 characters) to implement. Personally, I like to be able to count on 'a' <= x <= 'z' to check for lower case, and I don't feel a bit of shame, as you put it, for thinking so.
Arrogant... you wouldn't be able to properly read the names of people or cities, for example. And people won't be much impressed if you couldn't even spell their names properly in a letter. You don't have to go as far as China, you don't even have to leave your own country. You know, that hispanic next door isn't named Jose, his name is José...
My computer is not a map or a pen, and I don't have a neighbor named Jose. I don't have an accented 'e' key, either; these things don't apply to me, so why should I support them in something I create in my spare time?
Unfortunately in a tone that incites criticism, because you try to hide your lazyness, and perhaps even your inability to comprehend, behind a claim of "not necessary".
I'm by no means lazy, and I can comprehend Unicode just fine; I'd just rather not bother with something I won't use. It's the same reason I'm not developing my operating system for the PowerPC.
...and trying to get it over with is a sign of civilized behaviour.
You know, you Americans did a great effort driving home the message to us Germans that xenophobia and chauvinism is a bad thing. It's been a major subject at school for the last half-century. Perhaps it's time to return the favor...
Who are you to define civilized behavior? If anything, it would be
uncivilized to favor people in another country over the ones who live around me. Also, it
would be civilized for
you to not make broad generalizations about
my country, and the people in it.
See, we see no reason to leave you unflamed just because it would be comfortable to you.
Classy. Hint hint, you're the only one flaming me; why do you refer to yourself as
we?