Newsgroups: comp.std.c++
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: National character representation of C++ (was: design by committee)
Message-ID: <1990Nov29.222806.26120@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1016@zinn.MV.COM> <1990Nov23.211727.2802@zoo.toronto.edu> <1990Nov25.161506.9659@tsa.co.uk> <1990Nov27.143307.8086@lth.se>
Date: Thu, 29 Nov 90 22:28:06 GMT

In article <1990Nov27.143307.8086@lth.se> dag@control.lth.se (Dag Bruck) writes:
>Do you have an ISO Latin 1 keyboard?  Do you suggest I could use one?
>ISO Latin 1 solves some of the output problems (ever considered why
>it's called ISO Latin *1*?), but it does not solve the input problem.

Of course not.  Neither does ASCII or any other character set.  In all
cases, there has to be some sort of mapping between the 60-odd keys of
your keyboard and the rather larger internal character set.  Furthermore,
this mapping has to be locale-specific to some degree, since the set of
most-commonly-needed characters will vary.

I don't understand why you want your programming language to try to
solve the problem of keyboard mappings.

>I believe the current proposal by Bjarne Stroustrup has important
>merits by combining readability and writability, compared to
>trigraphs...

Nobody advocates using trigraphs as a way of writing programs; they are
strictly a data-interchange format.  Please find a real argument, not
this strawman.

> I also know several people that prefer kerywords like
>'or' instead of '|' even though they have a US keyboard.

sed 's/ or /|/g'

does it without any changes to the language, if you really care so little
about the readability of the text to your successors (who will be expecting
programs written in C).
-- 
"The average pointer, statistically,    |Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
points somewhere in X." -Hugh Redelmeier| henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry