From: Christopher Croughton <crough45 AT amc DOT de>
Message-Id: <97Sep22.091027gmt+0100.11661@internet01.amc.de>
Subject: Re: or symbol
To: bshadwick AT juno DOT com (Ben N Shadwick)
Date: Mon, 22 Sep 1997 08:15:01 +0100
Cc: crough45 AT amc DOT de, djgpp AT delorie DOT com
In-Reply-To: <19970920.112140.8910.0.bshadwick@juno.com> from "Ben N Shadwick" at Sep 20, 97 07:20:25 pm
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Ben N Shadwick wrote:
> 
> Yes, I've actually used some French programs on my computer, and some of
> the keys on my keyboard (US) register as different ones to the program!

Yes - the ASCII codes for [, \ and ] for instance come out as accented 
characters (I don't remember which ones, and there are other characters
which do similar things; one of the best references is often older
printer manuals, especially the Epson ones, which often allow you to
set up the printer to print the natinal character set).

> You could buy a US/UK keyboard, but you'd probably have to go to a little
> trouble to get it to work with some of your programs... =) At least most
> European countries have basically the same alphabet; I can't imagine what
> computers in Asian countries must be like, for example.

Most of the time the only problem is dumping keyb uk or whatever (which
I do anyway - even though I'm British, I can't stand the UK layout with
things like quotes over 2 - double quote should be over the single quote
where God and IBM intended it).  That's under MSDOS, of course - on a
Unix system reconfiguring the keyboard can be more messy...

> =) From what I've heard, pipes on MSDOS and Unix serve a similar
> function, but their implementation is different.

Similar function in the shell only, but totally different implementation
and nonexistent in the kernel (some libraries, like the DJGPP one, do try
to implement them so that the interface at least looks similar to the
Unix one).  They aren't actually pipes, just anonymous temporary disk 
files, which can cause problems if (as I used to have) you have environment
variables TEMP or TMP pointing to a small ramdisk...

> >(If you really want a list of variant names for ASCII characters, the 
> >Jargon File (formerly the Hackers' Dictionary) has dozens...)

> I think I've seen that somewhere. Where can I go to take a look at it? =)

Start from the official site, http://www.ccil.org/jargon/jargon.html, and
follow links (or download the gzipped text version which I did).  The site
is rather slow from here, but may not be from other places - the piece of
wet string they call an Internet connection here is not very good...

Chris C