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In article <1991Apr16.130422.16607@dde.dk>, ct@dde.dk (Claus Tondering) writes:
> Could somebody please answer the following questions about
> the ISO 8859-1 (LATIN-1) character set:
> 
> 1) What is the currency symbol used for? And who uses it?
>    (I am referring to the symbol in position 0xa4 that looks like
>    a sun with four rays emmanating from it.)

It is a "generic" currency symbol; it's useful for making a one column header
representing money.

> 2) What are the feminine and masculine ordinal indicators used for?
>    (The symbols in position 0xaa and 0xba that look like a small
>    underlined a and o.) I believe they are used in Spanish, is that
>    true and for what purpose?

That's true, it's used in Spanish, and certain other Romance languages.
They have the function that "th" has in English, to "ordinalise" a number,
e.g. 20 -> 20th.  Depending on the noun's gender, either 0xAA or 0xBA is used.
I believe Spanish commonly ordinalises residence numbers in addresses.

> 3) What is the pilcrow sign used for? And who uses it?
>    (The symbol in position 0xb6 that looks like an inverted P.)

In (American) English, it represents a "paragraph break".  The King James
Version Bible has them to represent original breaks in the Scriptures.

> 4) Do the Germans consider the double-s (position 0xdf) a lower-case
>    letter, or is it both upper and lower case?

Only lower case.  Its upper case is SS.

> 5) Why does the standard contain the diacritical marks in separate symbol
>    positions, when they are also found as parts of letters? When would
>    you, for example, want to use the cedille (character 0xb8) or the
>    umlaut (character 0xa8) on its own?

When representing characters not found in 8859-1, e.g. two character sequence
0x54 0xB8 (T cedilla) to represent Romanian "T with cedilla".
-- 
"It is a question of cubic capacity; a man with so large a brain must have
something inside it."--Sherlock Holmes, _The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle_

Christian Carey (size 8 hat (USA))     uunet!cucstud!xcarey