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From: heimir@rhi.hi.is (Heimir Thor Sverrisson)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.nordic,comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: ASCII for national characters
Message-ID: <1373@krafla.rhi.hi.is>
Date: 23 Nov 89 01:20:51 GMT
References: <472@enea.se> <1353@krafla.rhi.hi.is> <2360@draken.nada.kth.se>
Organization: University of Iceland
Lines: 76

psv@nada.kth.se (Peter Svanberg) writes:

>>People with seven bit terminals can put filters on their news readers
>>so they get something meaningful out of the eight bit charaters.

>As usual, when you change fundamental things like this, you must make
>it as invisible as possible for everybody who hasn't got the equipment
>for or isn't interested in the improvements you can get as a
>consequence of the change. So, those who want the improvements is the
>ones who must make an effort to GET them, not everybody else to AVOID
>them (at least not when "everybody else" is in great majority).

Because of the structure of ISO 8859, the eight-bit characters will
fold into 'printable' seven-bit characters anyhow. If someone does
not change his old system to interpret the eight-bit characters, so what?
He's not interested anyway!

>>We have been using the ISO set here in Iceland for some years now and 
>>I'm very surprised of how far behind the Scandinavian contries are in 
>>this sense, they all seem to be using (their own special version of) 
>>seven bit modified ASCII sets.

>There are a number of problems with converting to use an eight bit
>character set. A large one is that most of the software and hardware
>we use doesn't know anything about it. (Yes, this is slowly changing
>now, but it isn't good yet, and certainly was not several years ago!)

You will be surprised if you really try to use eight bit data :-)
Most systems are at least 'eight-bit transparent', i.e.  they don't
'scrub' the data to seven-bit. Unix systems that I've used that do
better than that are for example HP-UX, IBM's AIX (both RT and PS/2)
all Unix's for Intel 80386 I've tested. The worst experience I've had
recently was with a Sun 4 csh that logs you out if you enter a character
with the eighth bit set! Many software packages now allow eight-bit
data. I was just testing Informix RDBS on this same Sun 4 and found
out that I could really enter eight bit data into forms, what I could
not do two years ago.  We've also got some public domain software that
has been *corrected* to be able to use eight-bit characters such as
mailers, editors and news readers.

>What did you use before? Have you really converted to ISO 8859-1
>everywhere in Iceland? On which operating systems?

We did have a national version of ISO-646 that could not cover all
the accented characters we've got. The Unix systems are generally using
ISO, which is the only official Iclandic standard for eight-bit character
sets. On PC's people are using a national version of the American PC-set
(yuk) and very few have adopted Code Page 850 that came from IBM when
they introduced the PS/2 line. On the IBM-360/370 and 3X and AS400 they
are using some (different) versions of EBCDIC :-(

>Other differences between us and you is that you have more non-ASCII
>characters than we have and that you - being a small isolated country
>- are very caring of your language etc. (For us it's rather the
>opposite on the latter point.)

The first point is certainly true, our alphabet has 36 characters, which
means that we need 20 characters (uc+lc) that are not in ASCII. I would
certainly not tolerate a letter from the authorities that would not have
my name spelled correctly !

>But, as I said, things are changing. I predict some character set
>confusion (of another kind than the current) in Europe in the next few
>years, followed by - comparatively - calm, in perhaps five years.

I don't think it will even take so long. All major hardware manufacturers
have made most of their terminal equipment independent of the character
set by moving functions into software that were previously done in
hardware. The european market is also the fastest growing for many soft-
ware houses and is in many cases already bigger than the US market. If
these people really want to make it over here they can solve many of
their problems by using ONE character set that covers the US, Europe and
South America!
--
Heimir Thor Sverrisson
heimir@rhi.hi.is