A new contender in the growing market for Arabic language systems has been developed following a collaborative development between Groupe Bull SA and the Tunisian Centre Nationale d’Informatique. Dubbed ABCIX for Arabic, Bull, CNI with the inevitable suffix, the software is to be marketed by Bull according to Centre director Farouk Kamoun, who claimed that the system had been developed using the X/Open specifications for 8-bit national language support to ensure portability. The market for Arabic language Unix systems is estimated to be potentially as high as 6,000 units in 1990; in Tunisia and the other former French colonies of Algeria and Morocco, demand for Arabic systems is being fuelled by the continuing shift away from the use of the French language. Adapting any system to cope with Arabic, and particularly a system that will also cope with other languages simultaneously, is no mean feat. There are, for a start, details such as the different calendar used by Muslims, and the fact that lines are written right to left. And, according to Kamoun, specially adapted terminals can help software cope with the differences in displaying the script on screen, such as the fact that vowels are displayed above or below the consonants, and that each letter can be represented in four or five different ways depending on its position in a word so that context-sensitivity has to be built in to the system. Then again, in some situations vowels may be omitted on output completely – a method used by Arabic language newspapers – or may be included only where their omission would lead to ambiguity. The import of technology into Tunisia has risen steeply, helped by the government’s decision to reduce import duties on computers. Government figures put 1988 imports at the dinar equivalent of $20.7m, up from $13m in 1987. At the same time, the tax regulations were changed at the end of last year in an attempt to make Tunisia extremely attractive for firms basing software development operations in the country. As a result, local organisations are said to be seeking joint ventures on software with foreign companies.
