dmr@research.UUCP (05/23/84)
When I visited Sweden a couple of years ago, I went to see a company
that was doing a Unix port. During the drive to the Stockholm suburbs,
my host, a financier-entrepreneur type, warned me that one of the things
they were most worried about was the lack of user-friendliness of the
shell. He didn't know the details, but I braced myself for the sort
of discussion one can imagine.
It turned out that they loved the way the shell worked, had no problems
at all with its style of communication. The problem was that, to
the Swedes, characters like {}|\ were letters, not syntactic symbols.
It's a real problem. I gather that the best-equipped users had terminals
that would switch graphics depending on whether they were writing C or
documents.
Dennis Ritchiepaul@dual.UUCP (05/23/84)
>When I visited Sweden a couple of years ago, I went to see a company >that was doing a Unix port. During the drive to the Stockholm suburbs, >my host, a financier-entrepreneur type, warned me that one of the things >they were most worried about was the lack of user-friendliness of the >shell...... The problem was that, to >the Swedes, characters like {}|\ were letters, not syntactic symbols. If Unix and "C" had stuck to using a reasonable subset of ASCII, this problem would never have occurred. There would be no problems with translations to EBCDIC or even six bit character sets. It would also let those unfortuneate enough still to have Teletype 33s or 35s to use them provided the idiotic differentiation between upper & lower case were removed at the same time. It would make "C" code easily distinguishable from characters received from a bad modem, something that is not always possible at a glance. FORTRAN quite sensibly has avoided using some of the wierder ASCII characters. It is also still the most widely used and most portable high level language. Even PASCAL, with all its problems, avoided anything really odd. Of course, it would be unrealistic to expect the inventors of "C" and Unix to actually stoop so low as to look at anyone elses work. The only thing that they chose to copy, as I understand it, was the notorious slow speed of operation and elements of the cryptic syntax of MULTICS. In this they certainly succeeded. Paul Wilcox-Baker. The above is probably not the opinion of my employers and to be taken somewhat tongue-in-cheek.
leif@erix.UUCP (Leif Samuelsson) (05/25/84)
> ... The problem was that, to the Swedes, characters like > {}|\ were letters, not syntactic symbols. > > It's a real problem. I gather that the best-equipped users > had terminals that would switch graphics depending on > whether they were writing C or documents. > > Dennis Ritchie That's right, writing C and shell commands is almost impossible on a terminal with a swedish character set. Even Pascal is a bit hard, but some compilers will accept (* *) instead of { } and (. .) instead of [ ]. If you have a terminal with selectable character sets, you can train your editor to switch, depending on what type of text you are editing. I have set up EMACS so that it selects the right character set on my VT100 depending on what mode I'm in (which in turn is controlled by filename suffixes). This works even if I have two windows, one with C code in it and the other holding a document in swedish. Leif Samuelsson LM ERICSSON Tel. Co. S-126 25 STOCKHOLM SWEDEN ..{decvax, philabs}!mcvax!enea!erix!leif "E { e }, } i }a { e |" "It is a river, and in the river there is an island" (This is a dialect of swedish. My apologies to the people in the province of V{rmland for the lack of a V{rmland character set).
wsmith@umn-cs.UUCP (Warren R. Smith) (05/26/84)
#R:research:-103000:umn-cs:4300003:000:68 umn-cs!wsmith May 25 10:26:00 1984 Make me laugh! Fortran portable? This one should be in net.jokes.