dag@control.lth.se (Dag Bruck) (11/27/90)
In article <1990Nov25.161506.9659@tsa.co.uk> domo@tsa.co.uk (Dominic Dunlop) writes: >In article <1990Nov23.211727.2802@zoo.toronto.edu> henry@zoo.toronto.edu >(Henry Spencer) writes: >> I would have hoped that X3J16 would not be re-hashing all the dumb ideas... >> The right answer to national character sets is ISO Latin 1 or equivalent, > >equipment which talks using an 8-bit character set such as ISO Latin 1 >is an obvious (minimum) requirement for program development. Do you have an ISO Latin 1 keyboard? Do you suggest I could use one? ISO Latin 1 solves some of the output problems (ever considered why it's called ISO Latin *1*?), but it does not solve the input problem. I believe the current proposal by Bjarne Stroustrup has important merits by combining readability and writability, compared to trigraphs. I also know several people that prefer kerywords like 'or' instead of '|' even though they have a US keyboard. Dag Michael Br\"uck (who has his own problems, as you can see) -- Department of Automatic Control E-mail: dag@control.lth.se Lund Institute of Technology P. O. Box 118 Phone: +46 46-108779 S-221 00 Lund, SWEDEN Fax: +46 46-138118
henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) (11/30/90)
In article <1990Nov27.143307.8086@lth.se> dag@control.lth.se (Dag Bruck) writes: >Do you have an ISO Latin 1 keyboard? Do you suggest I could use one? >ISO Latin 1 solves some of the output problems (ever considered why >it's called ISO Latin *1*?), but it does not solve the input problem. Of course not. Neither does ASCII or any other character set. In all cases, there has to be some sort of mapping between the 60-odd keys of your keyboard and the rather larger internal character set. Furthermore, this mapping has to be locale-specific to some degree, since the set of most-commonly-needed characters will vary. I don't understand why you want your programming language to try to solve the problem of keyboard mappings. >I believe the current proposal by Bjarne Stroustrup has important >merits by combining readability and writability, compared to >trigraphs... Nobody advocates using trigraphs as a way of writing programs; they are strictly a data-interchange format. Please find a real argument, not this strawman. > I also know several people that prefer kerywords like >'or' instead of '|' even though they have a US keyboard. sed 's/ or /|/g' does it without any changes to the language, if you really care so little about the readability of the text to your successors (who will be expecting programs written in C). -- "The average pointer, statistically, |Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology points somewhere in X." -Hugh Redelmeier| henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry
frose@synoptics.COM (Flavio Rose) (11/30/90)
This is in response to the questions "why is there a 1 in ISO Latin 1" and "does ISO Latin 1 address oriental languages like Kanji". There's a 1 in ISO Latin 1 because there's also ISO Latin 2 through 4. The reason there were four is that when they looked at all the letter-accent combinations used by European languages in the Latin alphabet, there were too many to fit in the 190 or so positions of an eight-bit character set, so they had to define four. ISO Latin 1 is not a solution e.g. for Turkey, or for Hungary. People in those countries need a different ISO Latin n to mix text in their own language with material that uses full ASCII. Re "oriental languages like Kanji" -- for starters I don't quite like that phrase. I still think of kanji as denoting certain characters while the name of the language is Japanese. Calling kanji a language is like calling Cyrillic a language. Anyway... In essence, Japanese programmers don't suffer from the problem that Europeans who use ISO 646 have; they are able to type ASCII and see it on their screens the way English-speakers do, while simultaneously typing their own language. Since the Japanese don't have the problem, they don't need ISO Latin 1 as a solution. There is a slightly different issue: While Japanese C programmers can usually use Japanese in comments and character strings, compilers often won't let them have identifier names come out in normal Japanese writing (they can still use Japanese in identifiers by spelling it out phonetically in Latin letters, e.g. Kyoto Common Lisp's sys:nani, but obviously that's not so nice). I would suspect Europeans might have similar problems with many compilers if they tried to put ISO Latin 1-encoded accented letters into identifiers. But this is a different problem from the one that trigraphs try to address. Yours truly, Flavio Rose SynOptics Communications, Inc. Newsgroups: comp.std.c++ Subject: Re: ISO Latin 1? (was Re: design by committee) Summary: Expires: References: <1016@zinn.MV.COM> <1990Nov23.211727.2802@zoo.toronto.edu> <CIMSHOP!DAVIDM.90Nov26181052@uunet.UU.NET> Sender: Followup-To: Distribution: comp Organization: SynOptics Communications Inc. Mountain View, Ca. Keywords: This is in response to the questions "why is there a 1 in ISO Latin 1" and "does ISO Latin 1 address oriental languages like Kanji". There's a 1 in ISO Latin 1 because there's also ISO Latin 2 through 4. The reason there were four is that when they looked at all the letter-accent combinations used by European languages in the Latin alphabet, there were too many to fit in the 190 or so positions of an eight-bit character set, so they had to define four. ISO Latin 1 is not a solution e.g. for Turkey, or for Hungary. People in those countries need a different ISO Latin n to mix text in their own language with material that uses full ASCII. Re "oriental languages like Kanji" -- for starters I don't quite like that phrase. I still think of kanji as denoting certain characters while the name of the language is Japanese. Calling kanji a language is like calling Cyrillic a language. Anyway... In essence, Japanese programmers don't suffer from the problem that Europeans who use ISO 646 have; they are able to type ASCII and see it on their screens the way English-speakers do, while simultaneously typing their own language. Since the Japanese don't have the problem, they don't need ISO Latin 1 as a solution. There is a slightly different issue: While Japanese C programmers can usually use Japanese in comments and character strings, compilers often won't let them have identifier names come out in normal Japanese writing (they can still use Japanese in identifiers by spelling it out phonetically in Latin letters, e.g. Kyoto Common Lisp's sys:nani, but obviously that's not so nice). I would suspect Europeans might have similar problems with many compilers if they tried to put ISO Latin 1-encoded accented letters into identifiers. But this is a different problem from the one that trigraphs try to address. Yours truly, Flavio Rose SynOptics Communications, Inc.