| .tr -\(hy |
| .TL |
| Hello World |
| .br |
| or |
| .br |
| Καλημέρα κόσμε |
| .br |
| or |
| .br |
| こんにちは 世界 |
| .AU |
| Rob Pike |
| Ken Thompson |
| .AI |
| .MH |
| .AB |
| Plan 9 from Bell Labs has recently been converted from ASCII |
| to an ASCII-compatible variant of Unicode, a 16-bit character set. |
| In this paper we explain the reasons for the change, |
| describe the character set and representation we chose, |
| and present the programming models and software changes |
| that support the new text format. |
| Although we stopped short of full internationalization\(emfor |
| example, system error messages are in Unixese, not Japanese\(emwe |
| believe Plan 9 is the first system to treat the representation |
| of all major languages on a uniform, equal footing throughout all its |
| software. |
| .AE |
| .SH |
| Introduction |
| .PP |
| The world is multilingual but most computer systems |
| are based on English and ASCII or worse. |
| The pending release of Plan 9 [Pike90], a new distributed operating |
| system from Bell Laboratories, seemed a good occasion |
| to correct this chauvinism. |
| It is easier to make such deep changes when building new systems than |
| by retrofitting old ones. |
| .PP |
| The ANSI C standard [ANSIC] contains some guidance on the matter of |
| `wide' and `multi-byte' characters but falls far short of |
| solving the myriad associated problems. |
| We could find no literature on how to convert a |
| .I system |
| to larger character sets, although some individual |
| .I programs |
| have been converted. |
| This paper reports what we discovered as we |
| explored the problem of representing multilingual |
