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From: paul@dual.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.followup
Subject: Re: re national characters
Message-ID: <534@dual.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 23-May-84 11:54:33 EDT
Article-I.D.: dual.534
Posted: Wed May 23 11:54:33 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 26-May-84 13:16:21 EDT
References: <1030@research.UUCP>
Organization: Dual Systems, Berkeley, CA
Lines: 33


>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......  The problem was that, to
>the Swedes, characters like {}|\ were letters, not syntactic symbols.

If Unix and "C" had stuck to using a reasonable subset of ASCII, this
problem would never have occurred.  There would be no problems with
translations to EBCDIC or even six bit character sets.  It would also
let those unfortuneate enough still to have Teletype 33s or 35s to use
them provided the idiotic differentiation between upper & lower case
were removed at the same time.  It would make "C" code easily
distinguishable from characters received from a bad modem, something
that is not always possible at a glance.

FORTRAN quite sensibly has avoided using some of the wierder ASCII
characters.  It is also still the most widely used and most portable
high level language.  Even PASCAL, with all its problems, avoided
anything really odd.

Of course, it would be unrealistic to expect the inventors of "C"
and Unix to actually stoop so low as to look at anyone elses work.
The only thing that they chose to copy, as I understand it, was the
notorious slow speed of operation and elements of the cryptic syntax
of MULTICS.  In this they certainly succeeded.

		Paul Wilcox-Baker.

	The above is probably not the opinion of my employers
	and to be taken somewhat tongue-in-cheek.