International UNIX

[Keld J|rn Simonsen]

<>

A while ago there was some discussion in these groups on
international UNIX. I missed it due to faults in our news system.
(I still wonder why). Here is my two cents worth.

The EUUG is also having a Standards Commitee on International
UNIX. We are seeing forward to a cooperation with the /usr/group/UK
group. There is a meeting on this in connection with the EUUG Copenhagen
Conference scheduled to Thursday 12th September 1985.

As Leif Samuelson noted, some chars in what you think is ASCII,
but in reality is ISO 646-1983, are reserved for national use,
namely the twelve (12) chars:

             #$@[\]^`{|}~

Various European National Standardisation Boards have adopted
character representations different from ASCII on (in total)
all the abovenamed positions. So these should not be thought of
as generally useful for international software, any of these characters
will generate weird output at least in one major European area.

Yes, we need to be able to have variable names with these characters.
ANSI C does not allow this, but it allows a representation of nine of
the abovenamed chars in *trigraph* form: ?? is used as a lead-in to
define:

#       [       \       ]       ^       {       |       }       ~
??=     ??(     ??/     ??)     ??'     ??<     ??!     ??>     ??-       

$@` are not used (at the moment) in ANSI C.
Personally I do not like the choice of ? as lead-in char as it
is graphically quite dominating, maybe .. was better,
but the trigraph scheme is quite general and OK to me.
If we then could use the national chars in variable names, C could
become a quite useful programming language :-)