matt@brl-tgr.ARPA (Matthew Rosenblatt ) (08/12/85)
> Diacritical marks, contracted letters, and special characters are > not a sign of cultural identity -- they are annoying leftovers from > a time in which people used to do most of their writing with a pen > (or a brush, on the other side of the world). Let's hope they'll > soon get out of fashion! > > Thomas. First, the traditional abbreviations for the American States had to go, because they had a variable number of characters. So now we live with MA, CA, and DE instead of Mass., Cal., and Del. But that's not enough for the data processors! Take the Roman alphabet, with EXACTLY those additions (e.g., j and w) that Modern English had at the time speakers of Modern English invented computer data processing. AND THAT'S WHAT YOUR LANGUAGE HAD BETTER USE, BUDDY! No more cedilles for you Frenchmen -- make that "Fransais." No more tildes for you Spaniards. No more fadas for you Irishmen. And you Scandinavians had better get into line, too. I don't believe that natural language, written or spoken, should serve the needs of data processing. Rather, how about the following deal: We natural language users won't tell you data processors how to write your FORTRAN or Extended Mercury Autocode. You don't tell us how to write our native languages. -- Matt Rosenblatt
dave@uwvax.UUCP (Dave Cohrs) (08/16/85)
You will probably be happy to know that one manufacturer, DEC, has the ability to use all of these wonderful European characters on it's newer keyboards (that usually useless 'Symbol' key on the VT202's or whatever they're called) which actually work on the Rainbow and print on DEC dot-matrix printers. They also have these characters in their fonts for the LN01/LN01S. DEC also has some sort of 'international' character set whose lower 128 characters are the standard ASCII characters, while the next 128 are a number of useful mathematical symbols and European characters. Also, the Xerox 8000's running STAR also have Spanish, German and (I think) French characters available. I know, I've written papers using them! -- Dave Cohrs (608) 262-1204 ...!{harvard,ihnp4,seismo,topaz}!uwvax!dave dave@wisc-romano.arpa
peter@baylor.UUCP (Peter da Silva) (08/17/85)
> I don't believe that natural language, written or spoken, should serve > the needs of data processing. Rather, how about the following deal: > We natural language users won't tell you data processors how to write > your FORTRAN or Extended Mercury Autocode. You don't tell us how to > write our native languages. > > -- Matt Rosenblatt Gee, I thought you natural language users were just telling us how to write our 'C' programs. Must have been an illusion. -- Peter da Silva (the mad Australian werewolf) UUCP: ...!shell!neuro1!{hyd-ptd,baylor,datafac}!peter MCI: PDASILVA; CIS: 70216,1076
henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (08/21/85)
Note that there is an ANSI/ISO/etc. 8-bit-character-code standard in the works, well advanced in fact. This is intended to include most of the European special alphabetics, I believe. Dec may well be anticipating it a bit with their new terminals. -- Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology {allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry