filename separators and option indicators

[Guy Harris]

>	And I think that apply to other Indo-European language character sets 
>also (Suppose British uses starling figure for the place of backslash?)

Some, but not all.  I suspect the ISO 646 character set for the UK may
substitute "pounds sterling" for "dollar sign".  The ISO 646 character
sets are 7-bit character sets; mostly ASCII, but a few character
positions are designated for "national characters".  The US version is
ASCII.

However, if you go for the more state-of-the-art ISO 8859 character
sets, you get to use the 8th bit; all the 8859 character sets are ASCII
in the first 128 positions (8th bit zero), and have additional
characters including accented letters, etc. in the next 128 positions. 
ISO 8859/1, the Western Europe and (North?) American (in the sense of
the American continents, not the US) character set, has both "$" in the
usual ASCII position, as well as "pound sterling".

(There's also ISO 10646, which is a *big* character set under
development that will supposedly give you all the characters in the
world, or at least a big subset including Japanese & Chinese and the
like....)

>Come to think there's no cent figure for ASCII.  Anyone know why?

Not enough demand to cause some other character to be shoved out?  ISO
8859/1 *does* have it, one position before "pound sterling".