Geoffrey is fifteen and a video-game enthusiast of long standing. I think he enjoyed the consumer electronic marvels on sale in Akihabara (a shopping district in Tokyo) at least as much as the ancient temples, shrines, and gardens. He brought home a suitcase half full of gadgets, and still more incentive to keep learning his Japanese.

What I learned was equally interesting, at least for my world. The market for embedded systems is large and growing in Japan. An important segment of that market is video games. And an important trend in that market segment is away from programming in assembly language toward developing video games in C. Game systems are finally powerful enough, and complex enough, that the clear benefits of a higher-level language outweigh the equally clear costs.

C++ is still on the horizon for these folks, who still begrudge lost bytes and microseconds in a very competitive marketplace. But a separate sector of the Japanese market is happy at the prospect of better support for Japanese text processing in C++. Two of the more ambitious proposals adopted into the draft C++ Standard this past year have Japanese authorship. Both go a long way toward putting Kanji text processing on an equal footing with ASCII text in the Standard C++ library. Folks who write large applications in C++ now face a happier prospect for manipulating text based on large character sets.

I always enjoy my visits to Japan. On a personal basis, I like many aspects of the culture and its heritage. Professionally, I like the dynamism and competition the Japanese bring to the business of software development. This trip was particularly fun, however, because I got to see many things anew from the perspective of an active fifteen-year-old. Our technological innovations are becoming his cultural heritage.

P.J. Plauger
pjp@plauger.com