Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: Uninitialized externals and statics
Message-ID: <1989Aug30.041424.25869@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <2128@infmx.UUCP> <4700042@m.cs.uiuc.edu> <1989Aug25.185428.3511@utzoo.uucp> <609@paperboy.OSF.ORG> <10831@smoke.BRL.MIL> <1392@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu> <10859@smoke.BRL.MIL> <1403@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu>
Date: Wed, 30 Aug 89 04:14:24 GMT

In article <1403@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu> hascall@atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu.UUCP (John Hascall) writes:
>   If you are not going to restrict the "local alphabet" *
>   characters to a contiguous sequence of integer values it certainly
>   makes the problem of writing a portable sorting routine difficult.

Uh, if you think that's the worst problem with writing a portable sorting
routine, you have no *concept* of the horrors that European languages commit
in defining collating sequences.  (The less said about Asian languages
the better...)  This is the least of the problems.  Building a sorting
routine that will "do the right thing" portably is a staggering task.

Incidentally, wishing for a contiguous alphabet will not make IBM (and
its non-contiguous-alphabet character set, EBCDIC) go away.  That alone
kills the idea.
-- 
V7 /bin/mail source: 554 lines.|     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
1989 X.400 specs: 2200+ pages. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu