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