New US Rep to ISO C

[Rex Jaeschke]

> >The primary objection at this stage comes from the Danes who want
>                                                     ?????
> Who are they and what do they represent?

The principal ISO representative from Denmark (at least at the 
meetings I attended) was Keld Simonsen. Eunet: keld at diku.dk. He was 
also supported by a gentleman whose name I forget, from Unisys. At the 
last 2-3 ISO meetings they proposed trigraph changes with the full 
support of the Danish Standards Association. (Their C working group is 
designated S142u22A1). The administrative contact there has been Claus 
Tondering, ct at dde.uucp.

BTW, Keld and/or the Danish Standards Assoc. know Bjarne Stroustrop 
(the designer of C++) who is also Danish but resident in the US and 
working at Bell Labs NJ.  Several versions of the trigraph proposal
drafts actually have Bjarne's endorsement. And somewhere I recall 
seeing Bjarne's comment that "this shouldn't be too hard to implement" 
so the Danish rep thinks we just don't want to do it and not that it's 
technical impossible or undesirable.

> The solution is to buy equipment that support both ascii and
> ISO-646, using ascii for programming and ISO-646 for danish
> text. Even when stuck with ISO-646 only equipment it is not too
> hard to memorize the ISO-646 characters that map into the
> bitpatterns recognized by C compilers as {}[]|\. (ISO-646 is
> identical to ascii except for {}[]|\ )

Which bit patterns in particular are you talking about? Not trigraphs 
I presume. Whitesmiths (and others) invented digraphs for this some 
years ago for other alphabets but none has a solution that also 
handled ISO-646. Hence, ANSI invented trigraphs from scratch chosing 
characters that graphically resembled their meaning.

If you feel you have constructive input to the Danish Standards Assoc.
I encourage you to contact Keld and voice your opinions.

Rex

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