International Unix

[Father of micro-ln]

In article <2400 at brl-tgr.ARPA> bilbo.jbrown at ucla-locus.ARPA (Jordan Brown) writes:
>Unfortunately, you CAN'T build a good international character set.
>Some of those silly European countries have the same character in
>several languages, but sort the character in different places in each
>language.  They also have interesting constructs like characters that
>sort as two characters, and pairs of characters that sort as single
>characters.  That is, there might be a character @ which sorts as "xy",
>so that @m sorts right after xylophone and before xyn.  Similarly, they
>sometimes say that the pair ll sorts as a single character; I don't
>remember where.
>

I guess I would like to see some examples of the above.  Are you saying
that in some language, the order of the letters might be "a b c ...",
whereas in some other language, the order might be "a c b ..."?  What
pair of languages is like this?  Also, in which language is some single
character considered as two characters?

I speak Spanish and some French.  Without thinking very much, something
like the double "l" (which at least in Honduras is pronounced the same
as a "y") would need to be treated as a single character, but written
out as two characters.  The problem is in capitalizing it.  There need
to be two forms for the uppercase double "l": "LL" and "Ll".  This would
mean that there would be two different codes for the uppercase double
"l".  Again, without thinking very much, this is the same situation as
with vowels, since they may have an accent.

Disclaimer: I am not an expert on International Unix.
--
Samuel A. Figueroa, Dept. of CS, Univ. of KY, Lexington, KY  40506-0027
ARPA: ukma!sambo<@ANL-MCS>, or sambo%ukma.uucp at anl-mcs.arpa,
      or even anlams!ukma!sambo at ucbvax.arpa
UUCP: {ucbvax,unmvax,boulder,oddjob}!anlams!ukma!sambo,
      or cbosgd!ukma!sambo

	"Micro-ln is great, if only people would start using it."