From: brahms AT mindspring DOT com (Stan Brown)
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.misc,comp.os.msdos.programmer,comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject: Re: Non Existant dos pipes - SOLUTION!
Date: Wed, 22 Sep 1999 16:39:41 -0400
Organization: Oak Road Systems
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aw AT mail1 DOT bet1 DOT puv DOT fi (aw AT mail1 DOT bet1 DOT puv DOT fi) wrote in 
comp.os.msdos.programmer:
>brahms AT mindspring DOT com (Stan Brown) wrote:

>> Ah -- the characters { | } are used for ø æ å (not necessarily in that 
>> order) on Danish-Norwegian keyboards. I think country 44 is Norway.

>Really?  I always though standard ASCII (characters <=127) was the same
>for all code pages.  At least it is for CP 437 and CP 850.

Really. Stroustrup writes about this very point in /The Design and 
Evolution of C++/. The C programming language needs the { | } characters, 
but Scandinavians had to type ø æ å, which are regular letters to them, 
to get the needed ASCII codes. As you may suspect, it made for some 
mighty strange-looking programs, so the ANSI C committee came up with 
ugly trigraphs to work around the problem. So in C the sequences ??< and 
??> can be used instead of the curly braces { }, and ??! for |. (By the 
way, | on my keyboard is a broken bar, but on my screen it's unbroken.)

ASCII is an American standard (the A in ASCII). ISO-8859-1 is an 
international standard, and in that standard the positions 32-127 do mean 
the same thing to all code sets. This is accomplished by moving ø æ å 
into the 160-255 range.

By the way, ø æ å (and Swedish ö ä) are actual letters in those 
languages, not just an accent on top of another letter like the French é.
But I digress.

-- 
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Cleveland, Ohio, USA
http://www.mindspring.com/~brahms/

"It's my opinion, and it's very true."