Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!psivax!torkil
From: torkil@psivax.UUCP (Torkil Hammer)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: ASCII for national characters
Message-ID: <2942@psivax.UUCP>
Date: 20 Nov 89 18:59:25 GMT
References: <472@enea.se>
Reply-To: torkil@psivax.UUCP (Torkil Hammer)
Organization: Pacesetter Systems Inc., Sylmar, CA
Lines: 31

In article <472@enea.se> sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog) writes:
#(This is hardly news for comp.std.internat readers, but the
#subject belongs to that group.)
#
#Salmela Jarmo (js@kaarne.tut.fi) writes:
#>PS. The ASCII standard that supports national characters is really
#>needed.
#
#Well, ASCII supports all national characters it can think of.
#I.e, American.
#
#But, seriously it exists. The standard you want is ISO 8859,
#which is a family of eight-bit standards, all with good all
#ASCII in the 0-127 slots, new control characters in 128-159,
#non-break space in 160 and "soft hyphen" in ord('-') + 128.
#Then the rest is different in the various standards, which
#are five standards with Latin characters, and one each with
#Kyrillic, Arabian, Hebrew and Greek characters. I don't if
#all of them are settled, but at least Latin-1 and Latin-2 are.

What I read is that the ESO got botched.  Some national letters
were overlooked, including the slashed o used in Danish and Norwegian
for the umlaut o, written o: in other European languages.
It does not help that the upper case variety of that letter is rather
close to the slashed zero used in USA to tell it from the letter O.
Danes are not likely to tolerate the o: as a substitute, and I doubt
Norwegians are.  WW2 and 1905 and such.

Can anybody confirm?

Torkil Hammer