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From: wnp@dcs.UUCP (Wolf N. Paul)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc,comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d,comp.emacs
Subject: Re: US PC programmers still live in a 7-bit world!
Message-ID: <126@dcs.UUCP>
Date: 25 Jun 88 14:28:14 GMT
References: <1988Jun22.223158.1366@LTH.Se>
Reply-To: wnp@dcs.UUCP (Wolf N. Paul)
Organization: DCS, Dallas, Texas
Lines: 45

In article <1988Jun22.223158.1366@LTH.Se> torsten@DNA.LTH.Se (Torsten Olsson) writes:
>US PC programmers still live in a 7-bit world!
>
>But we don't!
>
>Yes, there  i s  intelligent life outside the USA. We even live
>in an 8-bit world, which must come as a shocking piece of news
>to some of you.
>Take a look at the IBM PC character code set  a b o v e
>ASCII 127. Our alphabet is there, too, and you just can't imagine
>what funny results your tools yield when encountering them.
>
>So, if your pet program is to become our pet, too, you have
>to rethink concerning using the 8th bit as a flag, you have
>to rewrite toupper, tolower, word scan, delete word, word
>counters and the like.

As a native German-speaker I am aware of the problem Torsten refers to.
However, it is a bit more complex than his posting implies.

The C functions toupper()/tolower() rely on upper and lower case to be
two parallel groups of consecutive codes within the ASCII scheme. The way
IBM has chosen to implement non-English characters on its PC line is

(a) non-standard (i.e. applies only to IBM-compatible machines) and

(b) incompatible with the assumption about upper and lower case in ASCII
	and thus in C and other programming languages.

(c) incompatible with the way European characters are implemented in MOST
	printers and ANSI terminals.

The way IBM implemented it, all case functions would have to be table-driven,
which is much less elegant than working with the parallel ranges of characters
in standard ASCII.

So all of you Europeans should lobby hardware manufacturers to implement
foreign characters in an intelligent way, and in a STANDARD WAY across
different architectures, and THEN you can reasonably expect the authors
of compilers and libraries and tools to support these characters.

-- 
Wolf N. Paul * 3387 Sam Rayburn Run * Carrollton TX 75007 * (214) 306-9101
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