From: aw AT mail1 DOT bet1 DOT puv DOT fi
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.misc,comp.os.msdos.programmer,comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject: Re: Non Existant dos pipes - SOLUTION!
Date: 22 Sep 1999 21:54:58 GMT
Message-ID: <yAV63$lBD@c400>
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To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
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Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com

brahms AT mindspring DOT com (Stan Brown) wrote:
> 
> 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.)

Well, I'm using a Finnish/Swedish keyboard and I've been using Swedish
letters AND curly braces without a problem for a long time.  I've used
CP437, CP850 ("official" Swedish CP, but I prefer 437) and ISO-8859-1.

Maybe Stroustrup is referring to older, non-PC systems, using a modified
ASCII charset and 7-bit to represent characters?

In CP437, CP850, and ISO-8559-1 the non-English letters are all
above or equal to 128.

> 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.

Indeed.  In Swedish, å, ä, ö (correct order) are the last three letters
of the alphabet.