Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!lll-winken!uunet!mcsun!corton!irisa!irisa.fr!jorgense From: jorgense@irisa.fr (Finn Jorgensen) Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d Subject: Re: ALED goes to the wastebasket here in Iceland Message-ID: <1991Jun17.170947.24410@irisa.fr> Date: 17 Jun 91 17:09:47 GMT References: <3245@krafla.rhi.hi.is> <1991Jun15.124052.17827@cbfsb.att.com> <19965@csli.Stanford.EDU> <4093@sixhub.UUCP> Sender: news@irisa.fr Reply-To: jorgense@irisa.fr (Finn Jorgensen) Organization: Irisa, Rennes(FR) Lines: 39 As others have pointed out, the problem is not only with icelandic characters, but almost any language other than english. When Bill Davidsen (forgetting his apparently nordic origin) treats all these countries as "tiny isolated groups of people with particular needs", he excludes what probably sums up to a much greater market than the US. In France, we have exactly the same problems as Einar and frisk. We don't ask software writers to take care of our special codes, only to leave them alone. We have keyboard and screen-drivers to do the translation as has been pointed out, but the old habit from the days of RS232-connected terminals transmitting 7 bits plus parity (at that time, we HAD to mask the 8th bit to avoid havoc) seems to hang on in the US. When someone writes a program, he doesn't need to know what translates into what, but only has to remember that, in most countries, 8-bit character codes are needed. To test his program, he can enter any code above 127 and check that it makes it through. I remember an example of a very nice program that failed at one point : PFM (kind of point-and-shoot sort of shell). It handles 8-bit codes nicely apart from the that, before arriving on-screen, gets stripped and becomes (looks awful on-screen). All the other accented characters, as well as line-drawing chars, greek and math symbols work fine. I realize that word-searches and the like (advance word by word, etc...) will work erratically, but this is usually less disturbing than not to be able to type at all. As concerns MS-DOS support of all these oddities, I find that (for a change) they are handled quite transparently, which is all that I ask for. No flames intended, especially towards B. Davidsen who does an excellent job of providing us with software of varying (sometimes very good) quality, but please dont forget that the US is a subset of the world and not the opposite. When a non-american writes software, he writes for the whole world, why shouldn't an american do likewise ? finn bo jorgensen (yes, that is danish, but I happen to live in France) jorgense@irisa.fr mail : Jorgensen, IFSIC, Universite de Rennes I, Campus de Beaulieu, 35042 RENNES CEDEX FRANCE