Newsgroups: comp.std.c++
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: ISO Latin 1? (was Re: design by committee)
Message-ID: <1990Nov28.164154.5718@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1016@zinn.MV.COM> <1990Nov23.211727.2802@zoo.toronto.edu> <CIMSHOP!DAVIDM.90Nov26181052@uunet.UU.NET>
Date: Wed, 28 Nov 90 16:41:54 GMT

In article <CIMSHOP!DAVIDM.90Nov26181052@uunet.UU.NET> cimshop!davidm@uunet.UU.NET (David S. Masterson) writes:
>Henry> The right answer to national character sets is ISO Latin 1 or
>Henry> equivalent...
>
>Does ISO Latin 1 address oriental languages like Kanji?  (Come to think of it,
>does trigraphs?)

Neither addresses the issue at all.  ISO Latin 1 and its friends deal fairly
well with the small-alphabet languages -- ISO Latin 1 in particular gets very
nearly all the Roman-alphabet languages, although it has to punt to its
siblings for Greek or Cyrillic alphabets -- but they're 8-bit character sets
that haven't a prayer of coping with the large-alphabet languages.  Trigraphs
are just a minimal way of writing C entirely in the ISO 7-bit character set
(of which ASCII and most other 7-bit codes are supersets).

The syntactic perversions that the Danes are pushing don't deal with the
matter either, by the way.  All they do is make trigraphs a bit less ugly.
X3J11 didn't think this was worth the trouble, and neither do I.
-- 
"The average pointer, statistically,    |Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
points somewhere in X." -Hugh Redelmeier| henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry
