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From: sommar@enea.UUCP (Erland Sommarskog)
Newsgroups: net.internat
Subject: Re: Are the funny letters really needed?
Message-ID: <1176@enea.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 18-Feb-86 13:39:14 EST
Article-I.D.: enea.1176
Posted: Tue Feb 18 13:39:14 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 21-Feb-86 08:15:10 EST
References: <172@bu-cs.UUCP>
Reply-To: sommar@enea.UUCP (Erland Sommarskog)
Distribution: net
Organization: Enea Data, Sweden
Lines: 40

In article <172@bu-cs.UUCP> bzs@bu-cs.UUCP writes:
>
>>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?)
>
I don't think the "umlauts" should be moved elsewhere, at least not in ASCII.
Move the braces and brackets somewhere else. It just so happens that the
ASCII I am used to represents my alphabet. (Almost: W isn't really part
of it and oA is placed two steps wrong.) What would you think of a collating
sequence like: 
   A B C $ / # D E F ) = #  and so forth.
I think one of basic ideas behind this conference is to make it possible
not only for English-speaking people to not to have write special sort 
programs, but be able rely on standard program (like grep) or standard 
functions in programming languages. (like < >, etc for string comparisons in 
Pascal.)
This of course also includes how things are represented on the screen and
the keyboard.

So you're right, compilers will need to be rewritten. Not only to fit the
different keyboards, but also the HUMAN BEEINGS behind them. And of course it's
a very big tail wagging a small dog. The tail is the vast majority of the
people in the world who don't have English as their native language and
the dog is those who do.

Erland Sommarskog
ENEA Data
Stockholm
Sweden