History of Firebirds compatibility with the real world

This started as an email, but I realsied that I needed to expand on various point as I go, so this is the base version and I can add detail pages on various points.

This started as an email, but I realsied that I needed to expand on various point as I go, so this is the base version and I can add detail pages on various points. ((Ideal timestamp data)) identifies my ideal timestamp.

Many of the current standards do not always take real world situations into account, or even define basic limitations they have assumed. Blindly following one standard, such as the SQL ones misses the fact often that these were written before other standards that provide the essential data. Also at that time computers only talked in English so there was no need to worry about other alphabets. Today native English speakers and Christians are a minority and the majority expect their computers to work with their standards and at the very least allow them to enter data in their local language. So UTC8 tends to be a basic requirement of any data system and all the problems that introduces, yet the SQL standards are still essentially 'English' as is the case with most programming languages and international standards like the RFC system. PHP has even given up using anything but ASCII for code, although UTF8 variable names work most of the time if not documented and is another can of worms. We supposedly have a soultion to international names, but does it work everywhere?