🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <3866@rossignol.Princeton.EDU> tr@samadams.princeton.edu (Tom Reingold) writes:
>through 255 give the alternate characters, e.g. 132 is lower case 'a'
>with umlaut.  Does this mean that when the user hits his key marked
>with that letter than the application thinks he hit an ASCII 132?  What
>about scan codes for these keyboards?  Are charts available?  Or are
>the keyboards the same with different key caps?

The answer is that it depends on the application program.  Some programs
are written by STUPID authors that MASK the 8th bit.  I hate it!!!!!!!!!!
Especially since sometimes it is more work to MASK it than to leave it
alone!

Here in Iceland (and you Americans, note that down), we *must* use
additionally 10 lower case characters and 10 upper case characters that
are not part of ASCII.  They are however part of ISO 8859/1, codepage
861 and 850 from IBM for the PC/AT machines (and part of the Macintosh I
think?) 

For example DBase II, III, III+ doesn't allow us to use the big THorn. 
Instead it sees EOF and quits.  Wordstar used (and maybe still does)
the 8th bit to say: "print space, mask the 8th bit and print that
character".  WordPerfect does accept our characters, but it represents
them in a special way.  
(It accept our characters, which is more than could be said about some
other programs!!!) 
The Borland stuff usually behaves well about our 'special characters'



PROGRAMMERS:  UNITE.  **DON'T** MASK THE 8TH BIT!!!


--
Internet: einari@rhi.hi.is        |   "Just give me my command line and throw
UUCP: ..!mcsun!isgate!rhi!einari  |   the GUIs in the waste basket!!!!"

General Surgeons warning:  Masking the 8th bit can seriously damage your brain!!