Re: Compiler Recommendations

["Jerry Feldman-2" <user=4@nabble.blu.org>]

 On Fri, 04 Jan 2008 14:36:23 
John Chambers <[hidden email]> wrote: 

> Consider yourself lucky.  Of course, EBCDIC is still  alive  in  some 
> corners of the computer industry. I still occasionally see email that 
> has been passed through an IBM mainframe, with the charset translated 
> to  EBCDIC and back to ASCII in the process.  This does "interesting" 
> things to Latin1 or UTF-8 encoded messages. 
> 
> But ASCII and its descendents aren't all that more  rational.   After 
> all,  we're using an alphabet that puts "Zanzibar" before "apple" and 
> after "Apple".  Getting things into proper dictionary order (for  the 
> user's choice of dictionaries) isn't much easier than with EBCDIC. 
> 
> At least we're past the days when it was difficult to  find  printers 
> or software that handled lower-case letters.  So now we don't have to 
> shout to be understood.