8859 vs. 646

[Keld J|rn Simonsen]

From: keld at diku.dk (Keld J|rn Simonsen)

I confess: I was the Dane attending the ISO POSIX Internationalization
meeting in Copenhagen. Yes, we attracted the attention to ISO 646
based non-ASCII equipment - which there are general guidelines
within ISO to work with.

I do share the other posters' concern about supporting 8-bit
and multibyte character sets, and bringing support to this
is more important to us (Danish Standards) than the 7-bit issue.

On the other hand, there is a lot of hardware, including terminals
and printers, which only supports national variants
of ISO 646. And that equipment will be around for a long time.

For Americans: try to imagine that all your 7-bit ASCII equipment
was not usable for running UNIX or C. It lacked some say 6 to 10
essential characters. How long would it take before you only
would have 8-bit equipment and software running?
Well, this is the situation we have in quite some parts of Europe.

ISO has rules for dealing with this. I think it would be worth
it to try out the ISO recommendations on a software
platform as important to the whole society as POSIX is.

Keld Simonsen

Volume-Number: Volume 19, Number 21