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From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: sci.lang,comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: Character representation
Message-ID: <8462@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 22-Aug-87 22:44:57 EDT
Article-I.D.: utzoo.8462
Posted: Sat Aug 22 22:44:57 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 22-Aug-87 22:44:57 EDT
References: <15381@mordor.s1.gov>, <1583@athena.TEK.COM>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 24

> I haven't seen anyone mention an ISO standard yet.  I was under the impression
> that there was one.  Am I wrong?  I don't much care for the alternates
> that I have seen used by terminal manufacturers in the US which is a
> keyboard with many of the special symbols replaced with accented characters.

Unfortunately, this *is* the (old) ISO standard.  Seven or eight of the
special symbols in ASCII are in positions which the ISO 7-bit standard
designates as "reserved for national alphabets", or words to that effect.
ASCII, of course, doesn't need any extra national-alphabet symbols, so
it filled those positions with neat but ASCII-specific things.

The mess that results from this was a major motivation for the new ISO
Latin standard, which is an 8-bit character set that includes all of ASCII
plus some extra goodies plus pretty well everything needed to write the
Latin-derived languages.  ISO Latin is unquestionably the wave of the
future -- it will help a lot and won't hurt much.  It WILL hurt a little
(for example, there aren't many Unix programs that use the top bit of char
for something else, but those few are exactly the programs that one least
wants to modify:  the editors and the shells!), but it won't be a tenth
as painful as the more drastic changes needed to do seriously non-Latin
alphabets like Chinese and Arabic.

My own personal view is that ISO Latin is a Good Thing, I am planning my
software for it, and everybody else should too.  The various proposals
for dealing with the non-Latin alphabets, on the other hand, all seem to
me to have rather higher price tags, and I take a "wait and see" attitude
toward them.
-- 
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