Re: Emacs release schedule and Akihito's abdication

[Paul Eggert]

Clément Pit-Claudel wrote:
> Can you clarify how Japanese text would break?

Sorry, I don't know exactly. One thing is that the regular expression 
[[:alpha:]] wouldn't match the new character even though it'll be alphabetic. 
Although I expect more issues will arise, not being a heavy-duty Japanese user I 
don't know what they'll be.

From the Unicode point of view, the issue is not merely assigning a code point 
for the new character (that's already done: it'll be U+32FF), it's assigning 
compatibility decompositions, something that won't be known until the new 
emperor chooses his name. For example, the current emperor's name ㍻ (U+337B) is 
a composition of 平成 (U+5E73, U+6210). Because decompositions must be cast in 
stone before the code point is officially issued, Unicode won't update its 
tables until it knows the actual name and how it's composed. And because it 
won't update its tables, I expect that Emacs (and other software apps) will wait 
until it does, which means that older programs may well mishandle the new character.

The new emperor could help out by choosing a name now, but Japanese imperial 
protocol long predates Unicode and I expect they're not gonna change how they do 
things just because some young whippersnapper computer dudes ask them to.

Also, suppose the new emperor decides on a single-character name that's already 
in Unicode; presumably U+32FF will not be assigned to the name after all. I 
think this unlikely, though, as getting a character of your own is one of the 
perks of being emperor.

There are other possibilities, including the unexpected death of an emperor 
(things get pretty complicated for dates, but I expect for text it's merely just 
keeping a catalog of all the names).