The Internationalisation of Unix - A European View

[Andries Brouwer]

In article <330 at erisun.UUCP> leif at erisun.UUCP (Leif Samuelsson) writes:
>
>For everyone's info, the following eleven characters are to be
>considered national, and should be avoided in software meant to
>be "international":
>
>	#$@[\]^{|}~
>

No, one wishes to use the full national character set in identifiers,
command names etc. On the other hand, one also wishes to use the graphics
mentioned, both in texts and as syntax specifiers.
Finally, to write all european languages that use the roman alphabet
requires a little more than eleven additional characters.
Conclusion: make the codes for Scandinavian aa,ae,oe, for Icelandic -d,th,
for German sz, for Dutch ij, for French c,, for Spanish n~, for Turkish
dotless i, for accented vowels in many languages and the various special
symbols in Polish, Czech and Romanian distinct from each other and from
the codes for the graphics mentioned above. Clearly this requires an
expansion of the ASCII space from 7-bit to 8-bit.