From: janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com

On 11/23/25 01:54, Paul Edwards wrote:
> "Janis Papanagnou"  wrote in message
> news:10fepd8$3p5tk$4@dont-email.me...
>> On 11/15/25 10:33, Paul Edwards wrote:
>>> ...
>> ...
> And assuming someone only knows Greek, I don't want them
> to ever switch keyboards.

(I had been speaking just about switching the layout, not the
keyboard. The installation I spoke of used one Greek keyboard
used with three switchable layouts, for EN, GR, DE.)

(In another environment I'm using two keyboards, EN and DE, in
parallel on one system, each one with its own specific layout.)

>
> (I wouldn't want it if it was the other way around - and ASCII
> was in fact all Greek).

Not sure what you're trying to say here. ASCII was never Greek,
and ISO 8859-7 contains ASCII as subset and Greek in the upper
range.

>>> ...
>> ...
> Yes, any traditional Greek codepage is fine. Or even a
> non-traditional Greek codepage. I expect all the Greek
> characters to exist between x'80' and x'FF'.

I don't know what you mean by "non-/traditional Greek codepage".

(Back these days there was no 7-bit Greek codepage that I knew of
- but I'm not sure - but there was 8-bit [ASCII based/"extended"]
ISO 8859-7 in the late 1980's.)

> ...
> I don't expect the Greeks to learn English, but I do expect them
> to get used to using the software such that they recognize that
> when a particular bit of English gibberish like "Enter your name"
> appears on the screen, that they know it is time to enter their
> (Greek) name.

I see. - So something like:      Enter your name: Γιάννης

And the binary/encoded representation shall be, say, ISO 8859-7 ?

I'd have expected that old "C" versions supported 8-bit character
sets without any change; I cannot tell for GR, but I've certainly
used DE with ISO 8859-1 and -15 encoded data in "C" (without any
change of the language) that contained umlauts (for example).

(With gcc -std=c90 and LC_ALL=C I can at least create "Ölfräß" in
a contemporary system. But that might not be an exact test case,
as you may have in mind.)

> ...
>> ...
> As per 1980s. I'm not trying to change what you did in the
> 1980s. And I'm not trying to change the existing "accents".
> ie you type ^ and then a "u" and then you get a u with a
> hat. (in some countries).

(But that is just a configured way of how diacritical characters
can be entered through keyboard. In my systems I can set it with
the locale; using or not using "dead-characters", or some such.)

>> ...
> I don't want to use ASCII. Nothing a Greek-only person will
> ever type will be in ASCII, it will all be a SINGLE value
> between x'80' and x'FF'.

Yes, with ISO Latin 7 you'll have 8 bit available (as opposed to
7-bit ASCII). So if your system is supporting an 8-bit ISO 8859-7
character set that should probably work already; doesn't it?

>> ...
> It's not multi-language - well - not by preference. The end
> user would much rather have the prompts for "what is your
> name?" in Greek, but that's not on the table.

(Using a character encoding that supports two complete languages
is "multi-language", actually.)

>
>>> 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.
>>
>> Are you looking for an ASCII representation of that (template?) 'X'?
>> Something like "μ" (Like "µ" for 'µ' in HTML)?
>
> Yes, an ASCII representation of similar-to-uppercase "micro".

It's still unclear to me. - Above I got the impression you'd want
   Enter your name: Γιάννης
now it reads as if you want just a (7-bit) ASCII encoding, as in
   Enter your name: Giannis
In both cases upper-casing should be possible, though.

(I still don't see where you actually see or have the problem.)

> ...
>> ...
> It won't be ASCII or UTF-8. It will be what MSDOS in
> Greece did in the 1980s.

I cannot tell anything about DOS in Greek in the 1980's. As far as
memory serves, I know that (DOS based) Windows 95 could be used in
Greece with Greek keyboards and letters. (It should be possible to
Google what codepage Windows used back these days. I'm positive
that MS did not do any rocket-science back then in that respect.)

> ...
> Can you touch-type? I assume all SBCS users can touch-type
> in their language (if they learn). I expect someone who only
> knows Greek, to touch-type at full speed - in Greek - even
> when using my English-only software.

Yes. - And...? (Not sure what that has to do with the requirements.)

> ...

> I'm interested in Greek, Greek, Greek.
>
> At no extra processing or space cost to English.
>
> Exactly as it was when the C90 standard was created.
>
> Which came VERY close to supporting exactly that. The
> C89 standard was delayed for a year because of Europeans
> intending to change C89 to support locales. Instead, the
> Americans changed ANSI. And got it NEARLY right.
> You can't expect people to get things 100% right. So
> with the benefit of 35 years of hindsight, and a C library
> and operating system and supporting tools under my
> belt, I'm trying to add some MINOR touches to C90.

I cannot test; my expectation is that you can do what's described
above already with a Greek Latin 7 encoding natively in C90 as was
(most probably) done in Greece back in the late 1980's.

One thing *might* be crucial where you said:
 > Yes, an ASCII representation of similar-to-uppercase "micro".
But I didn't understand what you wanted here, so I'll bite.

Janis

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