Re: (no subject)

[Brian Stafford <brian stafford uklinux net>]

On Wed, 18 July 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.

Seems to me the defaults are stupid then.

Being only a simple soul, I'd have expected that after saying my locale is
"fr" I'd want French accented characters - by default.  Obviously, the
posix committee is *much* more intelligent than I.

Mind you I am given to wonder how much influence non-Americans had on the
design of this stuff.  It reminds me of a quote from the man page for an
ancient spell checker on Unix, which had a -b option for British spelling.
Under the BUGS section it listed a bug as "British spelling was done by an
American".  (AFAIK British spelling = spelling used by all english speaking
countries except US)

> Before that, unix was ASCII all the way, it wasn't even possible to display

This much I know, I've been a Unix enthusiast since 1981 :)

Brian