From: mutazilah@gmail.com

I am not 100% sure, but I believe some people (Greeks?)
have keyboards such that their native character set can be
freely entered, when they're working in their native language.

And if they are required to work in English, or rather, 7-bit
ASCII, they will "switch keyboards", ie using the mouse or
whatever to select a different keyboard, and type the English,
and then return to the Greek etc keyboard.

I'm interested in a slight change to C90. I'm not interested in
UTF-8 either.

I'd like to write a program using pure ASCII, and indeed, pure
English prompts, but not force a Greek user to switch keyboards.
I'm not interested in a complicated translation layer either.

Originally I was thinking I just need to modify my programs and
the Greek locale so that I could do:

if (toupper(c) == 'X') printf("whatever\n");

And make some random Greek character the equivalent of 'X', ie
the Greek user knows that when prompted to type 'x' (or 'X'), he
just needs to press (lambda or whatever Greeks use). The Greek
locale will convert lambda into X when passed to toupper.

However, it was pointed out to me that this would interfere with
storing filenames on traditional FAT, for example. Not everything
should be subject to uppercasing. The Greek, or Katakana, should
be preserved, not converted into ASCII gibberish.

So I was thinking I need some halfway point of equivalency.

I'm happy to change all my programs so that they don't rely on
the user typing in an exact character. ie I am happy to drop case
sensitivity from everything, "now that I know there's an issue".
Actually there are other environments where case sensitivity is
difficult. e.g. some CMS (mainframe) environments.

And making sure I do toupper() is a way to solve the issue for
the environments where case-sensitivity is difficult/impossible.
(assuming they exist).

But I'd like to go one step further and cater for Greeks etc.

And it seems to me that I want to not change toupper() - which
would be expected to uppercase Greek characters (or some
other language), independent of the uppercasing of any English
characters they happened to enter (potentially at "great effort"
of changing keyboards).

And what I'm really after is being able to designate some Greek
characters as the equivalent of English counterparts in circumstances
where that is appropriate, and there is a desire to avoid a keyboard
change. So a new isequiv() function as an extension to C90. (I'm
basically forking C90 to create a C90+ or C90.0.1 - same as we
do with software - bells and whistles go into C99 etc, not C90.0.1)

Any thoughts?

Thanks. Paul..
a

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