Article View: comp.std.c
Article #6045Re: Character Sets
From: Steve Hosgood
Date: Mon, 15 May 1989 12:46
Date: Mon, 15 May 1989 12:46
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3050 bytes
In article <10194@smoke.BRL.MIL> gwyn@brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn) writes:
>You appear to have the C language standardization committee confused
>with character code set standardization committees. In fact there
>have been numerous attempts to deal with this problem...
Sorry about the time delay in replying to this, but our newsfeed went missing
for a week..
The point I wanted to make (and I didn't express myself very well) was that
surely the C language standardization committee has confused its brief with
that of the character set standardization committee?
In article <397@cybaswan.UUCP> Henry Spencer writes:
> You've got the problem exactly backwards. ANSI C, and most other language
> projects now current, are perfectly happy to assume 8-bit character sets.
> The problem is that the *complainers* have 7-bit equipment that uses a
> different 7-bit standard, and *they* don't want to be forced to upgrade.
> They want officially-blessed, easy-to-read ways to write ANSI C using
> their own old equipment. (What next, an ANSI C encoding for the IBM Model
> 26 keypunch?!?)
>
Exactly, Henry, but again I come back to the question of whose problem are
we talking about? Typing curly brackets, pipe symbols, and hashes on 7-bit
equipment is surely a problem that is general to modern computing -
many languages use such characters, the C-shell uses them, some editors
use them in commands, etc, etc.
Henry Spencer continues:
> ...... Someday the [Danish and other] terminals etc. will
> speak ISO Latin, and that will solve this set of problems.
Yeah, but C compilers will end up carting around trigraphs in their lexical
analysers for evermore....
Sorry to bring this up again folks, but I'm *still* unhappy. The 'UCASE' hack
to allow UN*X to work on silly old terminals was put into the TTY handler. So
I believe should this trigraph thingy.
Steve
-----------------------------------------------+------------------------------
Steve Hosgood BSc, | Phone (+44) 792 295213
Image Processing and Systems Engineer, | Fax (+44) 792 295532
Institute for Industrial Information Techology,| Telex 48149
Innovation Centre, University of Wales, +------+ JANET: iiit-sh@uk.ac.swan.pyr
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arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcvax!ukc!reading!cf-cm!cybaswan!iiit-shReferences:
<4623@freja.diku.dk> <12.UUL1.3#5077@aussie.UUCP> <2469@ogccse.ogc.edu> <373@cybaswan.UUCP> <10194@smoke.BRL.MIL>Show Full Headers
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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcvax!ukc!reading!cf-cm!cybaswan!iiit-sh From: iiit-sh@cybaswan.UUCP (Steve Hosgood) Newsgroups: comp.std.c Subject: Re: Character Sets Message-ID: <442@cybaswan.UUCP> Date: 15 May 89 12:46:34 GMT References: <4623@freja.diku.dk> <12.UUL1.3#5077@aussie.UUCP> <2469@ogccse.ogc.edu> <373@cybaswan.UUCP> <10194@smoke.BRL.MIL> Reply-To: iiit-sh@cybaswan.UUCP (Steve Hosgood) Organization: Institute for Industrial Information Technology Lines: 49