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From: bzs@bu-cs.UUCP (Barry Shein)
Newsgroups: net.internat
Subject: Re: Are the funny letters really needed?
Message-ID: <172@bu-cs.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 16-Feb-86 17:22:15 EST
Article-I.D.: bu-cs.172
Posted: Sun Feb 16 17:22:15 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 18-Feb-86 03:26:37 EST
Organization: Boston Univ Comp. Sci.
Lines: 43


>The problem is of course not the national keyboard, it's the programming
>language. Using characters like {} that actually are letters in other
>languages is nothing but a crime. (Well, C is criminal anyway I think, 
>but that's another story.) And if the bloody stupid langauge must use
>these symbols, it also have to provide alternatives. E.g. most Pascal-
>compilers allow you to use (. .) instead of [] and (* *) to replace {}.

I think this is the tail wagging the dog, and a mighty big tail wagging
a very small dog. Re-write the compilers and programming language texts
etc to fit the keyboards? Seems strange to me, seems like keyboards ought
to have curly braces if they have come into such common use and the
umlauts should be moved elsewhere (ie. both should be able to co-exist,
I don't understand, what's the big deal?)

In fact, our C compiler in our IBM environment was modified to accept what
you suggest (same as Pascal) because of the EBCDIC environment, trust me,
it causes lotsa confusion, it's unbelievable how annoying it is for students
(and worse, experienced programmers) to not be able to figure out how to
type a piece of code in because of brain-damaged keyboards, it's a nightmare
at user-services with person after person lining up to ask the same question
for about 3 years now. And once it gets typed in, try porting it, translating
that is such a stupid waste of time.

Of course, there is the compromise in C, as is stated in one of the C
references:

#define BEGIN {
#define END }

put that in some standard header file with the right codes and you
can probably ignore the problem for your own purposes for a while,
and everyone can have their own (things like FI and OD and ELIHW work
also.)

I suspect attitudes like the above will leave standards attempts
destroyed as people just sneer and say 'they gotta be kidding!',
many, many standards have died because they just were rejected by
the people to whom they were supposed to be useful. I think the original
poster this was addressed to makes his point well, he just undid his
'national' keyboard at the first opportunity.

	-Barry Shein, Boston University