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Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!mcvax!enea!erix!erisun!leif
From: leif@erisun.UUCP (Leif Samuelsson)
Newsgroups: net.internat
Subject: Re: Are the funny letters really needed?
Message-ID: <482@erisun.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 19-Feb-86 06:13:47 EST
Article-I.D.: erisun.482
Posted: Wed Feb 19 06:13:47 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 23-Feb-86 06:06:03 EST
References: <172@bu-cs.UUCP>
Reply-To: leif@erisun.UUCP (Leif Samuelsson)
Organization: Ericsson Information Systems AB, Sundbyberg, Sweden
Lines: 45

In article <172@bu-cs.UUCP> bzs@bu-cs.UUCP writes:
>  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?)

Re-write the ISO standard and fix all keyboards to fit the C compiler?
You've got to be kidding. The big deal is really that ASCII is a
national superset of the ISO character and other countries have other
versions of it. Curly braces do not *exist* in the ISO standard.

I really don't expect anyone to rewrite the C language, it's too
far gone for that. But it would be great if somebody could come up
with a suggestion for a shell syntax based on the ISO subset. It
shouldn't be too hard. (Like, how about using ':' for pipe? It's
much more mnemonic than lowercase o with dieresis).

>  ... 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

If you think that our keyboards are brain-damaged, then I think you
have misunderstood the whole issue.

Let me also repeat that I am not asking for support in Unix for the
Swedish character set. I'm only asking people to keep their hands
off the braces and brackets when writing new software meant for the
international market. (For instance, I wish that Larry Wall would
use (y,n,q) in prompts instead of [ynq]. The latter is totally
unreadable on our screens). Many people comment that we need a new
character standard. Fine, but until then, let's try to use what we
have.

Leif Samuelsson				..enea!erix!erisun!leif
Ericsson Information Systems AB, Advanced Workstations Department
S-172 93  SUNDBYBERG, Sweden		(59 19' N / 17 57' E)

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