Re: (no subject)

[Cristina Nunes <cmn isp novis pt>]

Meaning... no one really knows how to put it working right????

On 2001.07.18 10:51 M . Thielker wrote:
> Hi Brian,
> 
> On 2001.07.18 11:44 Brian Stafford wrote:
> > If someone can explain to me why French does not require accented
> > characters but "French French" does, I'd be interested to hear it. ;)
> > 
> 
> It's as simple as it's stupid! fr, FR, fr_FR are all _incomplete_ locale
> specifiers.
> A locale is defined as a country (fr), and underscore and a charset (FR),
> a
> dot and a codepage that determines the characters encoding.
> 
> fr_FR.850 is a complete locale specifier.
> 
> It tells us that we are in France (duh), want to use a French charset and
> encode it according to the western european codepage.
> 
> Since codepages have reasonable defaults, they can be left out. That's
> why
> fr_FR will suffice while fr will not.
> 
> This stuff has been around since long before unicode and other NLS
> support,
> it really dates from IBM's introduction of MODE in PC-Dos
> 
> Before that, unix was ASCII all the way, it wasn't even possible to
> display
> or process national characters with Coherent unix, for instance. There
> was
> just no way to enter them because the keymap didn't support that.
> 
> Now we have to live with the crimes of our forebears, wich include
> "locale"
> settings.
> 
> Melanie
> 
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> 
-- 
Cristina Nunes <cmn@isp.novis.pt>
Novis - Dir. Rede - ISP - Infraes. Portal <http://www.novis.pt/>
Ed. Atrium Saldanha - Pça. Dq. de Saldanha, 1, 7º / 1050 - 094 Lisboa
tel: +351 21 0104400/79 - fax: +351 21 0104301

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"Every absurdity has a champion who will defend it."