Uninitialized externals and statics

[Henry Spencer]

In article <1403 at atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu> hascall at atanasoff.cs.iastate.edu.UUCP (John Hascall) writes:
>   If you are not going to restrict the "local alphabet" *
>   characters to a contiguous sequence of integer values it certainly
>   makes the problem of writing a portable sorting routine difficult.

Uh, if you think that's the worst problem with writing a portable sorting
routine, you have no *concept* of the horrors that European languages commit
in defining collating sequences.  (The less said about Asian languages
the better...)  This is the least of the problems.  Building a sorting
routine that will "do the right thing" portably is a staggering task.

Incidentally, wishing for a contiguous alphabet will not make IBM (and
its non-contiguous-alphabet character set, EBCDIC) go away.  That alone
kills the idea.
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