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From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Compatibility with EBCDIC
Message-ID: <8452@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 22-Aug-87 20:05:32 EDT
Article-I.D.: utzoo.8452
Posted: Sat Aug 22 20:05:32 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 22-Aug-87 20:05:32 EDT
References: <855@tjalk.cs.vu.nl> <2683@hoptoad.uucp>, <1519@sol.ARPA>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 33

> I think that for too long language designers have tried to accomodate the
> vagarities of ASCII.  It has 'Z' < 'a' of all things!  Not only that,
> 'A' <= z && z <= 'z' allows non-letter characters.  The ISO Latin-n standard
> places various modified letters above delete!  Clearly kludgy.

Try coming up with an internationally-portable alternative.  The plain fact
is that there is *no* way to do sophisticated sorting using just the native
collating sequence, no matter what that collating sequence is.  Quite apart
from international differences in collating sequence (including non-trivial
complications like letter pairs that sort as if they were one letter), any
sophisticated sort is going to have its own requirements for treatment of
things like white space, abbreviations, etc etc.

Changing the collating sequence because "it makes sorting harder" is like
changing it because the bottom bits of the sequence "0123456789abcdef"
aren't the sixteen hex digits.  It means turning the world upside down to
"solve" a problem that will have to be solved the hard way *anyway*.

> ... are you implying the 360 architecture was badly designed.  This claim
> will need VERY good arguments to over-ride 25 years (almost) of success.

Nonsense.  Good design has only the most limited correlation with commercial
success.  IBM's strength is its marketing people, not its designers.  Are
*you* implying that the 8088 architecture was *well* designed?!?

> Remember, very few people have to distort Lisp to put it on a new
> architecture.

Yeah, because they're distorting it to suit their own ideas already -- name
three Lisp implementations that accept *exactly* the same language! :-)
-- 
Apollo was the doorway to the stars. |  Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
Next time, we should open it.        | {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,utai}!utzoo!henry