On Wednesday, March 16th, 2005 14:54Z Markus Kuhn va escriure:
>
>> do all keyboards permit input of US-ASCII characters.
>
> All standard keyboards used on PCs have always been able to enter
> the full ASCII repertoire.
Well, this should be taken with some care.
On the original (83 key) keyboard, besides the US layout there were British,
French, German and Spanish layouts. As everybody knows a number of ASCII
characters (the 'national variant' positions of ISO646) were not present at
level 1 or 2. I remember quite well the French one, and while it does have a
level 3 (Ctrl+Alt) with some of the keys (like the \ which was on the lower
left </> key, which get quickly erased), others characters like {, |, or },
were not present at level 3; so one had to use the backup mechanism using
Alt+123 on the numeric keypad.
Of course, it is possible to enter the whole ASCII repertoire (except NUL,
but it is always a special case anyway) using Alt+numeric_keypad, on about
any OS running on a PC, the trick above still works. But that is completely
orthogonal to speaking about keyboard layout, I think.
> It would be close to impossible to use Linux from a keyboard
> that does not allow you to enter all ASCII characters.
Yes. I certainly found it a pain to enter C code at the time using my
keyboard. I finally developped a special keyboard layout that eased the
process.
I also see "Polish programmers'", "Czech programmers'" etc. layouts still
floating around, and I suspect this has something to do with this subject...
Yet I do not have experience with these keyboards in programming.
> (Which is the reason why ANSI C trigraphs were ridiculed so much.)
(ANSI C trigraphs were not initially conceived to enter human-readable code,
rather to allow interchange of sources. As such they were not conceived as
readable, which indeed was a flaw, a flaw which digraphs intented to
correct -- but were only adding the insult to the injury, BTW. Yet,
ridiculing trigraphs is easy, until you exchange some code with Japan and
that suddently the logfiles becomes unreadable because all the lines are
lacking their ends, as they have been replaced with �n by the "intelligent"
mail system.)
Antoine
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Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
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