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  • Re: Character sets

    From Lars Poulsen@3:633/280.2 to All on Mon Jul 14 06:24:25 2025
    On 2025-07-13, Niklas Karlsson <nikke.karlsson@gmail.com> wrote:
    Not EBCDIC, but your mention of square brackets reminded me of the
    modified 7-bit ASCII that was used to write Swedish before ISO 8859-1
    and later Unicode made it big.

    "} { | ] [ \" were shown as "† „ ”  Ž ™" on Swedish-adapted equipment, making C code look absolutely ridiculous. Similar conventions applied
    for the other Nordic languages and German.

    This kept me from learning C for at least 5 years.
    And while Danish and Norvegian used the same characters, they had
    ifferent keyboard layouts. The Norvegian keyboard as I saw it on
    LA36 DecWriters in Denmark was atrocious. I had to fight to get Wang
    Labs to do a proper Danish keyboard for their word procedding systems.

    --- MBSE BBS v1.1.1 (Linux-x86_64)
    * Origin: A noiseless patient Spider (3:633/280.2@fidonet)
  • From Lars Poulsen@3:633/280.2 to All on Mon Jul 14 06:30:47 2025
    On 2025-07-13, Nuno Silva <nunojsilva@invalid.invalid> wrote:
    "} { | ] [ \" were shown as "† „ ”  Ž ™" on Swedish-adapted equipment,
    making C code look absolutely ridiculous. Similar conventions applied
    for the other Nordic languages and German.

    I played with ISO-646-FI/SE once in a Televideo terminal, but not for
    long enough to figure out how to handle day-to-day usage of a UNIX-like system without these characters.

    I (barely) know C has (had?) syntax and also iso646.h for such cases,
    but how would e.g. shell scripting be handled?

    This predates the idea of LOCALEs. So when writing a shell script where
    you needed a pipe symbol, you would use the proper ASCII character, but
    both the keyboard and the screen would show it as '™' on a Swedish
    terminal or as 'Ø' on a Danish device.

    --- MBSE BBS v1.1.1 (Linux-x86_64)
    * Origin: A noiseless patient Spider (3:633/280.2@fidonet)