Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!ucsd!usc!wuarchive!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!Teknowledge.COM!unix!synoptics!frose From: frose@synoptics.COM (Flavio Rose) Newsgroups: comp.std.c++ Subject: Re: National character representation of C++ (was: design by committee) Message-ID: <22115@mvis1.com> Date: 30 Nov 90 02:03:42 GMT References: <1990Nov25.161506.9659@tsa.co.uk> <1990Nov27.143307.8086@lth.se> <1990Nov29.222806.26120@zoo.toronto.edu> Organization: SynOptics Communications Inc. Mountain View, Ca. Lines: 99 This is in response to the questions "why is there a 1 in ISO Latin 1" and "does ISO Latin 1 address oriental languages like Kanji". There's a 1 in ISO Latin 1 because there's also ISO Latin 2 through 4. The reason there were four is that when they looked at all the letter-accent combinations used by European languages in the Latin alphabet, there were too many to fit in the 190 or so positions of an eight-bit character set, so they had to define four. ISO Latin 1 is not a solution e.g. for Turkey, or for Hungary. People in those countries need a different ISO Latin n to mix text in their own language with material that uses full ASCII. Re "oriental languages like Kanji" -- for starters I don't quite like that phrase. I still think of kanji as denoting certain characters while the name of the language is Japanese. Calling kanji a language is like calling Cyrillic a language. Anyway... In essence, Japanese programmers don't suffer from the problem that Europeans who use ISO 646 have; they are able to type ASCII and see it on their screens the way English-speakers do, while simultaneously typing their own language. Since the Japanese don't have the problem, they don't need ISO Latin 1 as a solution. There is a slightly different issue: While Japanese C programmers can usually use Japanese in comments and character strings, compilers often won't let them have identifier names come out in normal Japanese writing (they can still use Japanese in identifiers by spelling it out phonetically in Latin letters, e.g. Kyoto Common Lisp's sys:nani, but obviously that's not so nice). I would suspect Europeans might have similar problems with many compilers if they tried to put ISO Latin 1-encoded accented letters into identifiers. But this is a different problem from the one that trigraphs try to address. Yours truly, Flavio Rose SynOptics Communications, Inc. Newsgroups: comp.std.c++ Subject: Re: ISO Latin 1? (was Re: design by committee) Summary: Expires: References: <1016@zinn.MV.COM> <1990Nov23.211727.2802@zoo.toronto.edu> Sender: Followup-To: Distribution: comp Organization: SynOptics Communications Inc. Mountain View, Ca. Keywords: This is in response to the questions "why is there a 1 in ISO Latin 1" and "does ISO Latin 1 address oriental languages like Kanji". There's a 1 in ISO Latin 1 because there's also ISO Latin 2 through 4. The reason there were four is that when they looked at all the letter-accent combinations used by European languages in the Latin alphabet, there were too many to fit in the 190 or so positions of an eight-bit character set, so they had to define four. ISO Latin 1 is not a solution e.g. for Turkey, or for Hungary. People in those countries need a different ISO Latin n to mix text in their own language with material that uses full ASCII. Re "oriental languages like Kanji" -- for starters I don't quite like that phrase. I still think of kanji as denoting certain characters while the name of the language is Japanese. Calling kanji a language is like calling Cyrillic a language. Anyway... In essence, Japanese programmers don't suffer from the problem that Europeans who use ISO 646 have; they are able to type ASCII and see it on their screens the way English-speakers do, while simultaneously typing their own language. Since the Japanese don't have the problem, they don't need ISO Latin 1 as a solution. There is a slightly different issue: While Japanese C programmers can usually use Japanese in comments and character strings, compilers often won't let them have identifier names come out in normal Japanese writing (they can still use Japanese in identifiers by spelling it out phonetically in Latin letters, e.g. Kyoto Common Lisp's sys:nani, but obviously that's not so nice). I would suspect Europeans might have similar problems with many compilers if they tried to put ISO Latin 1-encoded accented letters into identifiers. But this is a different problem from the one that trigraphs try to address. Yours truly, Flavio Rose SynOptics Communications, Inc.