Bill,

> This is very encouraging, and suggests that Squeak will get this
> right.  My reason for raising the concern is simply that I didn't
> want to back out of the _/:= hack too soon.  Given Yoshiki's
> estimate of 3.8 or 4.0 for integration of his work, it seems wise to
> step back, let him give us proper back arrows, and then sort out
> what if anything remains to be done.  If however, Squeak's unicode
> support was going to turn out to be bloating to images, it would
> find itself unused in many cases, and there would still be a need
> for a hack.

  Please note that multilingualized Squeak is nothing new; it just has
never been integrated with the main stream image.  Surely it is
constantly evolving, but the multilingualized Squeak has been out
there more than three years and has been used by thousands of people.

  There are books on the Japanese version of Squeak Etoys and one of
these got the #1 spot in the computer books sales ranking two weeks in
a row. Etc., etc.

  I think it is usable and I guess many other who use it think so
too.  It is just hard to integrate when both the base image and m17n
package is changing^^;

  Oh, by the way, a four page article I wrote for a magazine just came
out last week^^; Also, the "A Quick Trip to Objectland" book got
translated and published last week, too.

-- Yoshiki