Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!samsung!uunet!mcsun!sunic!tut!santra!hemuli.atk.vtt.fi!tml From: tml@hemuli.atk.vtt.fi (Tor Lillqvist) Newsgroups: comp.std.internat Subject: Re: ISO standards for non-Latin alphabets Message-ID: <4319@hemuli.atk.vtt.fi> Date: 23 Nov 89 16:27:54 GMT References: <433@wjh12.harvard.edu> Reply-To: tml@hemuli.atk.vtt.fi (Tor Lillqvist) Organization: Technical Research Centre of Finland Lines: 30 In article <433@wjh12.harvard.edu> djb@wjh12.UUCP (David J. Birnbaum) writes: > Reducing the 33-character Russian alphabet to 32 is >desirable not only because one letter is orthographically >marginal, but because 32 is a convenient number for binary com- >puters and can facilitate case folding. Note, however, that the >Russian characters begin in an odd-numbered column, while the >Latin characters begin in an even-numbered one, which means that >Latin and Cyrillic case folding require different algorithms.(13) If we are considering future standards and trends, I think it is irrelevant that the traditional 7-bit ASCII seems to enable case folding by a simple addition/subtraction of a constant value. The same goes for ISO8859/1 and /5 (Latin 1 and Slavic (or whatever it's called)). Surely all software designed to follow local custom and typesetting rules must use more sphisticated table-driven case folding and collating algorithms. There are many obscure special cases in different languages. One could maybe even go as far as saying that it was a Bad Thing that ASCII was degined so that the letters are in (English) alphabetic order. If they had been in random order, some standard string case folding and comparison programming language interface would have been developed earlier. (Having said this, I must admit thay I use traditional strcmp, strlwr and programming practice all the time, even though the HP-UX system I use has this NLS stuff.) -- Tor Lillqvist, VTT/ATK