Trigraphs.

[Guido van Rossum]

In article <...> rbutterworth at watmath.waterloo.edu (Ray Butterworth) writes:
>From what I can gather, there are not many people still buying
>French-ASCII terminals and those that have such terminals seem
>to prefer using the funny characters to using the trigraphs.
>Consider that at the moment trigraphs don't even exist outside
>the minds of the X3J11 Committee, and decide how many people
>that now use the funny characters and are going to switch to
>using trigraphs.

Although I would love to see that Ray is right, there is one unproven
premise here: "not many people are still buying French-ASCII terminals".
Here at CWI in Holland we usually have to fight to get US style
keyboards on our equipment instead of Dutch national keyboards.  I have
the feeling that this might be the same or worse in other European
countries, perhaps more so than in Canada (an "international" standard
requires agreement from more countries than Canada and the US :-).

I can't believe that in France, for instance, with a large autonomous
computer industry, many US style keyboards are sold.  Especially since
the number of keyboards used for data entry will always outnumber those
used for programming (unless the software crisis really gets a hold of
us :-), I'm not so sure US-ASCII keyboards will win.  Would a company
with lots of data typists and some programmers buy special keyboards for
them?  Those programmers will then have to get used to both keyboard
styles used in their organization (if they are involved in any form of
user support).

A different solution of the problem would be a tendency for keyboards to
comprise both national and US-ASCII characters, in an ISO-ASCII set.  If
this is the development Ray is referring to, I just hope he's right.
Neither the VaxStations 2000 nor the Suns 3 we have here have anything
but US-ASCII (and zillions of unused function keys).
--
Guido van Rossum, Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI), Amsterdam
guido at piring.cwi.nl or mcvax!piring!guido or guido%piring.cwi.nl at uunet.uu.net