International UNIX

[Martin Minow]

Keld Joern Simonsen suggests, probably with tongue in cheek,
that C would be a useful programming languge if only European users
could use their full national character set in identifiers.

To my knowledge, no commercially available computer language --
including a few developed in Scandinavia such as Algol 60 (for
Trask and Besk), Algol-Genius (for the Datasaab machines) and
Simula (for Dec PDP10s) permit national letters in variable
names, so the marketplace hasn't exactly mandated their inclusion.

I would also point out that national replacement character sets
are being superseded by the Draft ISO/ANSI/ECMA 8-bit character
set called Latin 1.  Latin 1 has a unique representation for the
national letters of the major European languages and, once the
initial problems of going from a seven-bit character set to
an eight-bit set have been solved, should prove to be a much
simpler representation to deal with for international products.

Martin Minow (fil.kand. Stockholms Universitet)
decvax!minow