🚀 go-pugleaf

ahersee@dcs.warwick.ac.uk (Andrew Hersee) wrote:

>I now use a special character I never have used '*'. In my original letter I
>used * since the character I use does not exist in unix. I did in fact

>               \.-./
>                | |
>               /`-'\

>Well nearly anyway :-) Nothing uses that at the moment and I have never seen
>a sprite in the icon sprite pool with that character in it. Anyone know what
>that character is called ?

If you're talking about the character on the same key as the pound sign,
it's the International Currnency Symbol. It means "a random unspecified
currency" so you can stick it in front of a number and people know that you
are talking about a monetary quantity in an unspecified currency. That's the
theory anyway. In practice it's a minefield. The character appears at all
sorts of different locations in various different character sets (says he
putting his X.400 mail hat on) and has a nasty tendency to get used as a
catch all in character set conversions so you mail a dollar sign and it
comes out as an international currency symbol and vice versa. Indeed
Americans can be particularly insular about this - the standard X.400
character set (IA5 IRV - International Alpabet 5, International Reference
Version) is only 7 bit and it doesn't have a dollar sign or any other
currency symbol except the international currency symbol. Various American
customers of the company I worked for (Data General) insisted that we use
this character position for shipping around dollar signs instead. We
resisted (on the basis that it was wrong and that they and the systems they
were talking to should instead use a 16 bit character set) until they
threatened to take their money elsewhere, at which point we did them a
grungy patch :-(.

My advice - avoid this character like the plague. It's a top bit set
character too, which is another reason to avoid it if you want file
portability (anyone tried putting it on a DOS disk and then seeing what
MS-DOS thinks of it?).

Owen.