Newsgroups: comp.std.c++ Path: utzoo!henry From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) Subject: Re: ISO Latin 1? (was Re: design by committee) Message-ID: <1990Nov28.164154.5718@zoo.toronto.edu> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology References: <1016@zinn.MV.COM> <1990Nov23.211727.2802@zoo.toronto.edu> Date: Wed, 28 Nov 90 16:41:54 GMT In article cimshop!davidm@uunet.UU.NET (David S. Masterson) writes: >Henry> The right answer to national character sets is ISO Latin 1 or >Henry> equivalent... > >Does ISO Latin 1 address oriental languages like Kanji? (Come to think of it, >does trigraphs?) Neither addresses the issue at all. ISO Latin 1 and its friends deal fairly well with the small-alphabet languages -- ISO Latin 1 in particular gets very nearly all the Roman-alphabet languages, although it has to punt to its siblings for Greek or Cyrillic alphabets -- but they're 8-bit character sets that haven't a prayer of coping with the large-alphabet languages. Trigraphs are just a minimal way of writing C entirely in the ISO 7-bit character set (of which ASCII and most other 7-bit codes are supersets). The syntactic perversions that the Danes are pushing don't deal with the matter either, by the way. All they do is make trigraphs a bit less ugly. X3J11 didn't think this was worth the trouble, and neither do I. -- "The average pointer, statistically, |Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology points somewhere in X." -Hugh Redelmeier| henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry