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From: sommar@enea.UUCP (Erland Sommarskog)
Newsgroups: sci.lang,comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: Character representation
Message-ID: <2205@enea.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 21-Aug-87 16:35:45 EDT
Article-I.D.: enea.2205
Posted: Fri Aug 21 16:35:45 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 23-Aug-87 10:32:06 EDT
References: <1583@athena.TEK.COM>
Reply-To: sommar@enea.UUCP(Erland Sommarskog)
Followup-To: sci.lang
Organization: ENEA DATA Svenska AB, Sweden
Lines: 34
Xref: mnetor sci.lang:1189 comp.std.internat:144


This was intented to go by mail, but it came back to me. (Athena was
an unknown host.)

In article <1583@athena.TEK.COM> you write:
>I haven't seen anyone mention an ISO standard yet.  I was under the impression
>that there was one.  Am I wrong?  

You must have missed it. Tim Lasko from DEC wrote an article on the
status of the eight ISO standards. That was in comp.std.internat some
weeks ago.

The ISO standards are not sufficient. I don't whether you have read
my articles in comp.std.internat where I discussed the need for 
another concept for character represenation. I find it quite
inconvient to find the end of my alphabet somewhere at code 200.

>                                  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.
>That may be nice for writting documents, but it must be intollerable for
>coding in C or any other programming language which uses many nonalphabetic
>symbols.

Having screens with national characters replacing barckets and
braces is no problem. Many languages that uses these characters
allows alternatives. (E.g. [] can be replaced by (..) in most Pascal
dialects.) Languages that does not provide alternatives, I simply 
refuse to use. 
-- 

Erland Sommarskog       
ENEA Data, Stockholm    
sommar@enea.UUCP