Re: gcc compile-time (multibyte issue)

[dewar at gnat dot com (Robert Dewar)]

One thing to remember in this discussoin is that the normal lower half
(commonly referred to as ASCII), corresponds to the lower half in Latin-1.

Actually internationally the ASCII standard was a 7-bit standard that
was problematical, because characters like [] were national characters
that had quite different meanings (Pascal programs looked awful in 
Swedish for instance, because [] were used for extra swedish letters.

But Latin-1 is a nationally invariant definition, and [] mean [] for
everyone. The extra Swedish letters are found in the upper half.

Another example, 16#23# is # in ASCII, but the pound sign in British.
But in Latin-1, everyone agrees 16#23# is #, and the pound sign is in
the upper half. COnsequently a lot of programs in england will use at
least this character from the upper half.

The Latin-9 business came from needing to have a character position in
the upper half for the new Euro symbol, which will be widely used, so
Latin-9 will be the most widely used set in Europe these days. They
got rid of some little used character (I forget which). They also introduced
some missing letters so that Latin-9 is more generally usable in Europe

Anyway, the bottom line is that when a US programmer says they are writing
in ASCII, in practice what they are doing is using the lower half of Latin-1
or Latin-9 (the lower halves are the same).