Marketing wizardry & handling of far-east languages.

[Richard O'Keefe]

In article <1823 at draken.nada.kth.se>, ianf at nada.kth.se (Ian Feldman) writes:
>   Oh, yes?  I challenge you to come up with a solution to the Polish,
>   Slovak, Czech, Croatian, Latvian and few other European Latin-character
>   alfabets not currently cared for in either the EBCDIC, the "8-bit ASCII,"
>   or the DEC Multinational character sets.  Not to mention the present-day's
>   TOTAL inability to address/ display/ communicate with computers in bi-
>   lingual or multi-lingual mode... 

(a) ISO 8859 is a family of 8-bit character sets; in all of them the lower
    half is ASCII.  There is a member of the ISO 8859 family for Cyrillic,
    and I'm pretty sure each of the Eastern European languages listed is
    covered in at least one member of the family.  Of course, the trouble
    is trying to mix these things in a single document.

(b) Then there's the rather nice 16-bit character set that Xerox have...
    Xerox will be delighted to sell you a system that will let you mix
    English, Arabic, Russian, ...  It can be done.

Of course, there is real fun like converting "ss" from lower case to upper
case in German and back again.  At least the Egyptian Hieratic script is
dead (though from what I hear the Japanese system is nearly as complex).

>   P.S. The computer czars have gotten away with it so far.  Now that
>   Poland is about to re-join the Western society (in principle if not
>   yet in spirit) there is one less excuse for not catering to 'East-
>   European Commie languages'

Commie languages heck.  ISO 8859/1 is the first computer character set
to offer a decent approximation to ***ENGLISH*** and it is still missing
English quotation marks.