A-PIRARD@BLIULG11.BITNET (Andre PIRARD) (07/12/88)
The Forth-83 standard states that the internal character representation is ASCII. I feel the idea is wise, despite the fact that it may seem a burden to translate character codes for I/O to the system and that it may cause overhead. But so bad for systems ignoring standards. And my experience shows that the overhead is quite acceptable. But there is another point that the standard does not cover. We, international users, have need for an extended character set. There is now a very well done standard called ISO 8859 alias ANSI X3.134.2 and ECMA 94. It would be nice the new ANSI Forth standard extend the above rule to its own standard for characters. This applies to the names of words too. I am anti-Babelist and consider English as the first programming language. So I am not asking at all for keywords translation. But we can't ask everyone to know English and prevent those not concerned with portability to use their language, at least for their own words. Andr . [that is (or was) one].