sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog) (11/19/89)
(This is hardly news for comp.std.internat readers, but the subject belongs to that group.) Salmela Jarmo (js@kaarne.tut.fi) writes: >PS. The ASCII standard that supports national characters is really >needed. Well, ASCII supports all national characters it can think of. I.e, American. But, seriously it exists. The standard you want is ISO 8859, which is a family of eight-bit standards, all with good all ASCII in the 0-127 slots, new control characters in 128-159, non-break space in 160 and "soft hyphen" in ord('-') + 128. Then the rest is different in the various standards, which are five standards with Latin characters, and one each with Kyrillic, Arabian, Hebrew and Greek characters. I don't if all of them are settled, but at least Latin-1 and Latin-2 are. One can predict that for the next few years Latin-1 will be the most important since it covers all major Western European languages except Welsh and Catalan I think. Latin-2 covers Eastern European languages. Then of course there is problem to start posting Usenet articles from your VT320 using Latin-1. People with seven-bit terminals, of which there probably are a few, will get the new characters folded into old making your text quite incomprehensible, even worse than those brackets and braces you get using the national seven-bit conventions for dotted "a":s and "o":s. -- Erland Sommarskog - ENEA Data, Stockholm - sommar@enea.se