Text 10147, 73 rader
Skriven 2010-08-31 10:50:33 av Michiel van der Vlist (2:280/5555)
     Kommentar till en text av Robert Bashe (2:280/5555)
Ärende: Euro sign
=================
Hello Robert,

Wednesday August 25 2010 11:53, I wrote to you:

 RB>> Not really. If you leave out fido, though, I agree. We in fido
 RB>> have always worked on the basis of the lowest common denominator,
 RB>> and that's ASCII.

 MV> We have been using "high ASCII" in Fido for at least 15 years.

I would say that the lowest common denominator is the original IBM PC character
set. AKA codepage 437.

And of course what is most used for writing messages in Fido these days is
Cyrillic.

 RB>> I still convert my German special characters (automatically) into
 RB>> their ASCII equivalents - no German familiar with fido has any
 RB>> problems with that.

 MV> I know, but I also note that you are a bit of an exception. Anyway,
 MV> that conversion scheme does not work in all languages. Notably in
 MV> Dutch it does not work.

The reason it does not work is that in Dutch there are more vowels than the
five letters a,e,i,o,u. So some vowels are represented by a two letter
combinatien. oe, ui, ou, au, eu etc, etc. Some of the combinations that German
uses to represent umlauted characters are already taken.

Note that Dutch does not have the umlaut. The diaresis character however is
used to indicate that a two letter combination should not be pronounvced as one
vowel, but as two seperate vowels.

Dutch has accents and they are pretty indispensible. They serve to emphesize
things, but also to disambiguise. For example the word "een" can stand for "a "
as in "a car". It also stands for the number "one" as in "one car". when the
distinction is required and not clear from context, the number is written as
"één". Same with "voor". That can either mean "for" as in "flowers for
Algernon", (bloemen voor Algernon) or "before"as in 200 before Christ". (200
vóór Christus).

In the early days of Fido, e used compromises like writing "e1n"for "één",
but in this day and age that is no more acceptble than writing in capitals
only.

My guess is that many other languages, for example the Scandinavian ones, have
similar issues.

 RB>> As for the Euro, I don't really see the huge advantage in using
 RB>> the sign as against writing EUR.

 MV> Neither do I, and I have been using EUR since the beginning.

The problem with Fido and the Euro sign, is that it came so late in the game It
was only defined in 1996, development for DOS had already stopped by then, and
so it is not included in any of the DOS code pages distributed by Microsoft.

It is next to impossible to display the Euro sign on a DOS machine and quite
hard to do it in a text only window on a Windows system.

The Euro sign is included in characters sets used by Windows from W95 and
onwards, so with most windows applicayions, the Euro sign is no problem.
FidoNet software however almost exclusively runs in a text mode window...

The Euro sign is also included in one of the ISO-8859 series. IS0-8859-15 aka
Latin-9. It is not used much, it too came too late in the game, the Unix crowd
was already on the move towards unicode.


Cheers, Michiel

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