Internationalisation

[Mike Banahan]

You may be interested to hear of the creation of the newsgroup
net.internat, which is to serve as the forum for the working parties on
internationalisation.

It has a bearing on those interested in natural languages, because
many of the problems are both hard and prompted by the requirement, in
many countries, for systems which can process data in languages other
than English.

The effect on C may also be more than expected. Current proposals on
how to handle characters sets with more than 8 bits are likely
to make a substantial difference to the way that applications are coded.
To write a C program so that it is independent (as much as possible) of the
character set will require a new way of thinking.

Comments are invited.
-- 
Mike Banahan, Technical Director, The Instruction Set Ltd.
mcvax!ukc!inset!mikeb