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From: dmr@research.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.followup
Subject: re national characters
Message-ID: <1030@research.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 22-May-84 22:42:45 EDT
Article-I.D.: research.1030
Posted: Tue May 22 22:42:45 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 23-May-84 10:15:21 EDT
Lines: 16

When I visited Sweden a couple of years ago, I went to see a company
that was doing a Unix port.  During the drive to the Stockholm suburbs,
my host, a financier-entrepreneur type, warned me that one of the things
they were most worried about was the lack of user-friendliness of the
shell.  He didn't know the details, but I braced myself for the sort
of discussion one can imagine.

It turned out that they loved the way the shell worked, had no problems
at all with its style of communication.  The problem was that, to
the Swedes, characters like {}|\ were letters, not syntactic symbols.

It's a real problem.  I gather that the best-equipped users had terminals
that would switch graphics depending on whether they were writing C or
documents.

		Dennis Ritchie