Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!mcsun!news.funet.fi!cc.tut.fi!kaukasoi
From: kaukasoi@cc.tut.fi (Kaukasoina Petri)
Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d
Subject: Re: ALED goes to the wastebasket here in Iceland
Message-ID: <1991Jun19.103013.25421@cc.tut.fi>
Date: 19 Jun 91 10:30:13 GMT
References: <3259@krafla.rhi.hi.is> <2554@gold.gvg.tek.com> <3274@krafla.rhi.hi.is>
Organization: Tampere University of Technology, Finland
Lines: 31


In article <3274@krafla.rhi.hi.is> frisk@rhi.hi.is (Fridrik Skulason) writes:
>Well, although having the "correct" conversion between upper and lower case
>would be nice, it is not necessary for you to worry about this particular
>problem.
>
>I mean - they would be nice to have, but DOS only supports them partially,
>so we generally don't uses them - in fact, in the documentation of all the
>programs I sell here in Iceland (and I have written 3 out of 4 of the best
>selling programs here) there is a warning not to use our special characters
>in file names.
>
>-frisk

As a Finn, I do not agree. At least in Finland there is no reason not
to use all characters in filenames. If you give small letters in
filenames, DOS automatically changes them to capitals, including
8-bit special Finnish characters. But for example 4DOS and Norton
Utilities programs which change file names to lower case for some reason
leave those Finnish characters in upper case. Looks funny... There
is support for case conversions in foreign alphabets in DOS but
US programs do not use them. I have no idea why these programs
try to display file names in low case...

I think no one has written about alphabetical ordering in different
languages. If I have the following line in CONFIG.SYS
   COUNTRY=358,437,C:\DOS\COUNTRY.SYS
then for example DOS command SORT knows the order of alphabets
in Finnish. WordPerfect 5.1 seems to sort in the right order, too.
4DOS sorts the directory listing in a wrong order.

Petri