1*3e12c5d1SDavid du Colombier.tr -\(hy 2*3e12c5d1SDavid du Colombier.TL 3*3e12c5d1SDavid du ColombierHello World 4*3e12c5d1SDavid du Colombier.br 5*3e12c5d1SDavid du Colombieror 6*3e12c5d1SDavid du Colombier.br 7*3e12c5d1SDavid du ColombierΚαλημέρα κόσμε 8*3e12c5d1SDavid du Colombier.br 9*3e12c5d1SDavid du Colombieror 10*3e12c5d1SDavid du Colombier.br 11*3e12c5d1SDavid du Colombierこんにちは 世界 12*3e12c5d1SDavid du Colombier.AU 13*3e12c5d1SDavid du ColombierRob Pike 14*3e12c5d1SDavid du ColombierKen Thompson 15*3e12c5d1SDavid du Colombier.AI 16*3e12c5d1SDavid du Colombier.MH 17*3e12c5d1SDavid du Colombier.AB 18*3e12c5d1SDavid du ColombierPlan 9 from Bell Labs has recently been converted from ASCII 19*3e12c5d1SDavid du Colombierto an ASCII-compatible variant of Unicode, a 16-bit character set. 20*3e12c5d1SDavid du ColombierIn this paper we explain the reasons for the change, 21*3e12c5d1SDavid du Colombierdescribe the character set and representation we chose, 22*3e12c5d1SDavid du Colombierand present the programming models and software changes 23*3e12c5d1SDavid du Colombierthat support the new text format. 24*3e12c5d1SDavid du ColombierAlthough we stopped short of full internationalization\(emfor 25*3e12c5d1SDavid du Colombierexample, system error messages are in Unixese, not Japanese\(emwe 26*3e12c5d1SDavid du Colombierbelieve Plan 9 is the first system to treat the representation 27*3e12c5d1SDavid du Colombierof all major languages on a uniform, equal footing throughout all its 28*3e12c5d1SDavid du Colombiersoftware. 29*3e12c5d1SDavid du Colombier.AE 30*3e12c5d1SDavid du Colombier.SH 31*3e12c5d1SDavid du ColombierIntroduction 32*3e12c5d1SDavid du Colombier.PP 33*3e12c5d1SDavid du ColombierThe world is multilingual but most computer systems 34*3e12c5d1SDavid du Colombierare based on English and ASCII or worse. 35*3e12c5d1SDavid du ColombierThe pending release of Plan 9 [Pike90], a new distributed operating 36*3e12c5d1SDavid du Colombiersystem from Bell Laboratories, seemed a good occasion 37*3e12c5d1SDavid du Colombierto correct this chauvinism. 38*3e12c5d1SDavid du ColombierIt is easier to make such deep changes when building new systems than 39*3e12c5d1SDavid du Colombierby retrofitting old ones. 40*3e12c5d1SDavid du Colombier.PP 41*3e12c5d1SDavid du ColombierThe ANSI C standard [ANSIC] contains some guidance on the matter of 42*3e12c5d1SDavid du Colombier`wide' and `multi-byte' characters but falls far short of 43*3e12c5d1SDavid du Colombiersolving the myriad associated problems. 44*3e12c5d1SDavid du ColombierWe could find no literature on how to convert a 45*3e12c5d1SDavid du Colombier.I system 46*3e12c5d1SDavid du Colombierto larger character sets, although some individual 47*3e12c5d1SDavid du Colombier.I programs 48*3e12c5d1SDavid du Colombierhave been converted. 49*3e12c5d1SDavid du ColombierThis paper reports what we discovered as we 50*3e12c5d1SDavid du Colombierexplored the problem of representing multilingual 51