Character Sets

[Steve Hosgood]

In article <10194 at smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn at brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn) writes:
>You appear to have the C language standardization committee confused
>with character code set standardization committees.  In fact there
>have been numerous attempts to deal with this problem...

Sorry about the time delay in replying to this, but our newsfeed went missing
for a week..

The point I wanted to make (and I didn't express myself very well) was that
surely the C language standardization committee has confused its brief with
that of the character set standardization committee?

In article <397 at cybaswan.UUCP> Henry Spencer writes:
> You've got the problem exactly backwards.  ANSI C, and most other language
> projects now current, are perfectly happy to assume 8-bit character sets.
> The problem is that the *complainers* have 7-bit equipment that uses a
> different 7-bit standard, and *they* don't want to be forced to upgrade.
> They want officially-blessed, easy-to-read ways to write ANSI C using
> their own old equipment.  (What next, an ANSI C encoding for the IBM Model
> 26 keypunch?!?)
> 

Exactly, Henry, but again I come back to the question of whose problem are
we talking about? Typing curly brackets, pipe symbols, and hashes on 7-bit
equipment is surely a problem that is general to modern computing -
many languages use such characters, the C-shell uses them, some editors
use them in commands, etc, etc.

Henry Spencer continues:
> ...... Someday the [Danish and other] terminals etc. will
> speak ISO Latin, and that will solve this set of problems. 

Yeah, but C compilers will end up carting around trigraphs in their lexical
analysers for evermore....

Sorry to bring this up again folks, but I'm *still* unhappy. The 'UCASE' hack
to allow UN*X to work on silly old terminals was put into the TTY handler. So
I believe should this trigraph thingy.

Steve

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Steve Hosgood BSc,                             | Phone (+44) 792 295213
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