Steve Smith wrote:

<begin extract>
The main difference among the various flavors of EBCDIC is where the
square brackets are.  The rest is mostly accented letters.
</end extract>

and I have two comments.

The first is that where the square brackets, '[' and ']', are is not
so important as their presence of absence.  Writing C source programs
without them is problematic, but one can always arrange for the
translation of their code points.

The second is that 'accented letters' are much more important to, say,
francophones than they are to anglophones.  English is unique in
making little use of  'accented letters', but an inference from this
peculiarity to the notion that they are generically unimportant is at
once provincial and wrong.

John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA

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