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Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83 (MC840302); site erix.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!akgua!mcnc!decvax!mcvax!enea!erix!leif
From: leif@erix.UUCP (Leif Samuelsson)
Newsgroups: net.followup
Subject: Re: re national characters
Message-ID: <453@erix.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 25-May-84 15:17:38 EDT
Article-I.D.: erix.453
Posted: Fri May 25 15:17:38 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 1-Jun-84 21:08:53 EDT
References: <1030@research.UUCP> <534@dual.UUCP>
Organization: L M Ericsson, Stockholm, Sweden
Lines: 37

>	... 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

That's right, writing C and shell commands is almost impossible
on a terminal with a swedish character set. Even Pascal is a bit
hard, but some compilers will accept (* *) instead of { } and
(. .) instead of [ ].

If you have a terminal with selectable character sets, you can
train your editor to switch, depending on what type of text you
are editing. I have set up EMACS so that it selects the right
character set on my VT100 depending on what mode I'm in (which
in turn is controlled by filename suffixes). This works even if
I have two windows, one with C code in it and the other holding
a document in swedish.


	Leif Samuelsson
	LM ERICSSON Tel. Co.
	S-126 25  STOCKHOLM
	SWEDEN

	..{decvax, philabs}!mcvax!enea!erix!leif


"E { e }, } i }a { e |"

"It is a river, and in the river there is an island"

(This is a dialect of swedish. My apologies to the people in the
province of V{rmland for the lack of a V{rmland character set).