🚀 go-pugleaf

minow@mountn.dec.com (Martin Minow) writes:

>While the Macintosh is evolving towards a multi-lingual environment, they
>do not seem to be approaching the problem from in the same way as the
>ISO Standard body which, in the long term, may be a problem for all of us.
                   ^^^^^

Of course, the word "which" in the above quote alludes to the fact
that Mac (Apple Inc.) do not follow ISO. On the other hand, the (mis-)
interpretation that "which" alludes to the ISO standard body, gives
the quote an entirely different meaning.

I live in Sweden, where the national alphabet contains A-Z plus three
"umlaut" letters. The Swedish version of the old 7-bit ISO-646 (called
Swedish ASCII) has replaced the "[", "\", and "]" characters in ASCII
for the national letters, as has many versions of ISO-646 in other
European countries. I think the audience can imagine how Pascal and C
program listings look when the printer uses Swedish ASCII. Most
terminals made here have a SET-UP switch for selecting Swedish or US
ASCII.

When ISO published the 8859 standard in 1989 (or 1988?), many of us
thought this problem was solved once and for all. At Linkoping
University, SunOS 4.1 will soon be installed having 8 bit characters
and using ISO 8859. Northern Europe will use ISO 8859-1.

Unfortunately, the world is no more the same. The Berlin Wall has
fallen and the Soviet Empire is tumbling. You cannot imagine how many
accent marks these Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles, Czechs,
Slovacs, and Hungarians can invent! Not thinking about the Cyrillic
alphabet. And in 1992, the European Common Market will be a fact and
we will need to communicate with people in Portugal, Spain, Italy and
Greece.

Now, if we are lucky, all these letters are in ISO 8859-1 thru -9 (are
there nine?). But it seems we are stuck with this switching between
character sets that we know so well from the 7-bit era. Does the ISO
8859 have codes that tell the equipment to set the right version or
will we still do this by hand? Or should I learn postscript?

Lars Aronsson
     Aronsson@Lysator.LiU.SE