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From: davel@booboo.SanDiego.NCR.COM (David Lord)
Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d
Subject: Re: ALED goes to the wastebasket here in Iceland
Message-ID: <1991Jun17.203508.10919@donner.SanDiego.NCR.COM>
Date: 17 Jun 91 20:35:08 GMT
References: <3245@krafla.rhi.hi.is> <1991Jun15.124052.17827@cbfsb.att.com> <1991Jun15.220717.20911@klaava.Helsinki.FI>
Sender: rock@donner.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Rock Kent)
Reply-To: davel@booboo.SanDiego.NCR.COM (David Lord)
Organization: NCR Corporation, Rancho Bernardo
Lines: 29

In article <1991Jun15.220717.20911@klaava.Helsinki.FI> wirzeniu@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Lars Wirzenius) writes:
>In article <1991Jun15.124052.17827@cbfsb.att.com> mbb@cbnewsb.cb.att.com (martin.brilliant) writes:
>>We have a large world here, and Iceland is a small country.  If we all
>>knew how Icelandic characters are normally entered in an Icelandic
>>editor, more editors would provide for the entry of Icelandic characters.
>
>
>By the way, the seemingly endless stream of 7-bit-only software that
>refuses to accept Finnish text as input gives me a poor impression of
>the US culture. Or rather, it would, if I didn't know better.

One problem is that most US programmers have never seen a system with
a non-US character set. They simply aren't available here (at least not
that your average shareware programmer has access to). Not only that but
we've never even seen documentation for them. When I write a program that
I'm going to put on a BBS I may ask myself, "Will this work with foriegn
character sets?" but I have no way to know for certain unless I get input
from those users. For my real job I have written programs that support
non-US character sets and it's not always as simple as letting the eight
bit go through. For some applications you simply have to mask off the
non-displayable characters. Problem is that there's no way to find out
what the non-displayable characters are for any given character set.

I have to ask those Icelander's who denigrate us for not supporting their
character sets, do your programs work in Japaneese? I'd bet that few do.

If I find that one of my programs doesn't work in Icelandic I'll try to
fix it if you ask me and offer to test out the results. I'm not certain
I could extend the same offer for Kanji though (maybe for Katakana).