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From: lamy@utegc.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat,sci.lang
Subject: Re: Computers and human languages (was Re: What is a byte)
Message-ID: <8708171253.AA21033@ephemeral.ai.toronto.edu>
Date: Mon, 17-Aug-87 08:53:31 EDT
Article-I.D.: ephemera.8708171253.AA21033
Posted: Mon Aug 17 08:53:31 1987
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In article <717@maccs.UUCP> gordan@maccs.UUCP (Gordan Palameta) writes:
>French and German did not adapt to computers by dropping cedillas, umlauts,
>and accents; instead we now have ISO Latin.  Arabic has not adapted to

I beg to differ.  I have a cedilla in my name, and I can tell you that I have
not seen it appear very often in computer output in the last 25 years.  And
that (was) in a part of the world that tries to be officially French.

I used to use a CDC Cyber with a "shell" custom built to handle French.  The
system evolved over about 10 years, but that was only possible because the
machine was so crippled in the first place (6 bit chars, no text processing
utilities) that everything  was made from scratch (even the Pascal compiler
accepted accented identifiers).

I find it somewhat ironic that the recently version of "ngrep" moves toward
internationalization by trying to accomodate Japanese.  I am quite confident
that we will see a Japanese version of Unix before a French or a German one.

Just by curiosity, a quick scan of my brain seems to indicate that English
would be the only European language not to use diacritical marks, digraphs,
or extra letters. (? - I mean something like the dutch "ij").

Jean-Francois Lamy                      lamy@ai.toronto.edu (CSnet,UUCP,Bitnet)
AI Group, Dept of Computer Science      lamy@ai.toronto.cdn (EAN X.400)
University of Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4   {seismo,watmath}!ai.toronto.edu!lamy