🚀 go-pugleaf

peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) writes:

>Why can't the Danes define a character set, and preprocess it into trigraphs
>for compilation? There's no reason the editing character set needs to match
>the character set the compiler sees.

I can't tell if Peter's tongue is in his cheek.  Apologies, if so.

This is the kind of attitude which annoys those in the world whose native
language is not English.  I am not in that category, but in working on
the ANSI C++ committee I have been made aware of the sensibilities of
the European members.

One member's name contains an umlaut (two horizontal dots above a vowel).
He asked us to imagine how it feels NEVER to be able to see your name
spelled correctly in any computer correspondence.  (I can't even provide
the example here.)

Another member asked how we would feel if, for example, the letters
'l' and 'r' would always be considered equivalent, and the letter 'f'
was forbidden.

[Anothel membel asked how we wourd eer i, ol exampre, the rettels
'r' and 'l' wourd arways be consideled equivarent, and the rettel ''
was olbidden.]

So let's turn Peter's question around:  Why can't the Americans use
a preprocessor to convert ASCII source into some international
character set before compiling?  (I don't advocate this, but it seems
like an equally fair question.)
-- 

Steve Clamage, TauMetric Corp, steve@taumet.com