🚀 go-pugleaf

This is in response to the questions "why is there a 1 in ISO
Latin 1" and "does ISO Latin 1 address oriental languages like
Kanji". 

There's a 1 in ISO Latin 1 because there's also ISO Latin 2
through 4. The reason there were four is that when they
looked at all the letter-accent combinations used by
European languages in the Latin alphabet, there were too
many to fit in the 190 or so positions of an eight-bit
character set, so they had to define four.

ISO Latin 1 is not a solution e.g. for Turkey, or for
Hungary.  People in those countries need a different ISO
Latin n to mix text in their own language with material
that uses full ASCII.

Re "oriental languages like Kanji" -- for starters I don't
quite like that phrase.  I still think of kanji as denoting
certain characters while the name of the language is
Japanese. Calling kanji a language is like calling Cyrillic
a language. Anyway...

In essence, Japanese programmers don't suffer from the
problem that Europeans who use ISO 646 have; they are able
to type ASCII and see it on their screens the way
English-speakers do, while simultaneously typing their own
language. Since the Japanese don't have the problem, they
don't need ISO Latin 1 as a solution.

There is a slightly different issue: While Japanese C
programmers can usually use Japanese in comments and
character strings, compilers often won't let them have
identifier names come out in normal Japanese writing (they
can still use Japanese in identifiers by spelling it out
phonetically in Latin letters, e.g. Kyoto Common Lisp's
sys:nani, but obviously that's not so nice).  I would
suspect Europeans might have similar problems with many
compilers if they tried to put ISO Latin 1-encoded accented
letters into identifiers. But this is a different problem
from the one that trigraphs try to address.

Yours truly,
Flavio Rose
SynOptics Communications, Inc.
Newsgroups: comp.std.c++
Subject: Re: ISO Latin 1? (was Re: design by committee)
Summary: 
Expires: 
References: <1016@zinn.MV.COM> <1990Nov23.211727.2802@zoo.toronto.edu> <CIMSHOP!DAVIDM.90Nov26181052@uunet.UU.NET>
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Distribution: comp
Organization: SynOptics Communications Inc. Mountain View, Ca.
Keywords: 

This is in response to the questions "why is there a 1 in ISO
Latin 1" and "does ISO Latin 1 address oriental languages like
Kanji". 

There's a 1 in ISO Latin 1 because there's also ISO Latin 2
through 4. The reason there were four is that when they
looked at all the letter-accent combinations used by
European languages in the Latin alphabet, there were too
many to fit in the 190 or so positions of an eight-bit
character set, so they had to define four.

ISO Latin 1 is not a solution e.g. for Turkey, or for
Hungary.  People in those countries need a different ISO
Latin n to mix text in their own language with material
that uses full ASCII.

Re "oriental languages like Kanji" -- for starters I don't
quite like that phrase.  I still think of kanji as denoting
certain characters while the name of the language is
Japanese. Calling kanji a language is like calling Cyrillic
a language. Anyway...

In essence, Japanese programmers don't suffer from the
problem that Europeans who use ISO 646 have; they are able
to type ASCII and see it on their screens the way
English-speakers do, while simultaneously typing their own
language. Since the Japanese don't have the problem, they
don't need ISO Latin 1 as a solution.

There is a slightly different issue: While Japanese C
programmers can usually use Japanese in comments and
character strings, compilers often won't let them have
identifier names come out in normal Japanese writing (they
can still use Japanese in identifiers by spelling it out
phonetically in Latin letters, e.g. Kyoto Common Lisp's
sys:nani, but obviously that's not so nice).  I would
suspect Europeans might have similar problems with many
compilers if they tried to put ISO Latin 1-encoded accented
letters into identifiers. But this is a different problem
from the one that trigraphs try to address.

Yours truly,
Flavio Rose
SynOptics Communications, Inc.