Re: character sets (was: ConGermanicRomanceLang?)

> Date:         Tue, 12 Dec 2000 06:42:37 +0000
> From:         Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>
> Yep - I've never understood why most early versions of "extended ASCII" had
> symbols for y-diaeresis (not exactly common) but none for {y} with more
> common discritics.
Because the Dutch sent someone to the committee meetings who cared
about getting that letter into the character set, or because the
computer manufacturer could easily find out that the character was
needed.

And Welsh may well have been an official language of the UK well
before the work on ISO 8859 was begun --- but the guy from the BSI
probably didn't know or care, if they even bothered to send anyone.
I'm sure there will be a rant about it somewhere on Michael Everson's
pages. (The conscript registry guy).

I think there's a certain mainframe legacy here as well --- lots of
bank statements got printed in German, Dutch, Danish, French and so
on, so IBM had nice tables with code pages for those languages. If the
British banking industry didn't care about spelling Welsh names and
addresses correctly, the Welsh characters didn't get into the tables,
and the PC makers didn't put them in their machines.

Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marked)