🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <433@wjh12.harvard.edu> djb@wjh12.UUCP (David J. Birnbaum) writes:

>        Reducing the 33-character Russian alphabet to 32 is
>desirable not only because one letter is orthographically
>marginal, but because 32 is a convenient number for binary com-
>puters and can facilitate case folding.  Note, however, that the
>Russian characters begin in an odd-numbered column, while the
>Latin characters begin in an even-numbered one, which means that
>Latin and Cyrillic case folding require different algorithms.(13)

If we are considering future standards and trends, I think it is
irrelevant that the traditional 7-bit ASCII seems to enable case
folding by a simple addition/subtraction of a constant value.  The
same goes for ISO8859/1 and /5 (Latin 1 and Slavic (or whatever it's
called)).  Surely all software designed to follow local custom and
typesetting rules must use more sphisticated table-driven case folding
and collating algorithms.  There are many obscure special cases in
different languages.

One could maybe even go as far as saying that it was a Bad Thing that
ASCII was degined so that the letters are in (English) alphabetic
order.  If they had been in random order, some standard string case
folding and comparison programming language interface would have been
developed earlier.

(Having said this, I must admit thay I use traditional strcmp, strlwr
and <ctype.h> programming practice all the time, even though the HP-UX
system I use has this NLS stuff.)
-- 
Tor Lillqvist, VTT/ATK