Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!bloom-beacon!eru!hagbard!sunic!dkuug!iesd!iesd.auc.dk!amanda From: amanda@iesd.auc.dk (Per Abrahamsen) Newsgroups: comp.lang.eiffel Subject: Re: Reneging on promises (Internationalization) Message-ID: Date: 5 Jan 91 22:33:11 GMT References: <472@eiffel.UUCP> <2347@enea.se> Sender: news@iesd.auc.dk (UseNet News) Followup-To: comp.std.internat Organization: Games Research, University of Aalborg, Denmark Lines: 27 In-reply-to: sommar@enea.se's message of 29 Dec 90 22:05:16 GMT Followups has been directed to comp.std.internat. >>>>> On 29 Dec 90 22:05:16 GMT, sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog) said: Erland> This is actually not correct. Eiffel is responsible. ISO 646 Erland> clearly specifies that the characters #$@[\]^`{|}~ are subject to Erland> replacement in national character sets. It is probably wise to wait. The ANSI C committee did not understand the issues, and came up with a solution (trigraphs) which nobody likes. Erland> ISO hasn't really managed to get 646 into every Erland> programmers' mind, and often you hear expressions as "Swedish Erland> ASCII" which tells you which is the de facto standard. This is another good reason to wait. ISO 646 was created at a time where ASCII already was the de-facto standard. It was not backward compatible with ASCII, and therefore broke almost any application which used the ASCII character set. It is no wonder that programmers has been hesitant in accepting ISO 646. A new standard (ISO Latin1) has been created, which conforms to the ASCII standard, and is quickly being accepted. The best thing to do might be to ignore ISO 646, and switch to ISO Latin1 as fast as possible.