From: terje.mathisen@nospicedham.tmsw.no   
      
   wolfgang kern wrote:   
   >   
   > Terje Mathisen wrote:   
   >> In national language ascii versions the letters after Z and z ([\] and   
   >> {|}) are reserved for additional letters, i.e. here in Norway those   
   >> positions are translated into ÆØÅ and æøå.   
   >   
   > mmh.., and I thought the "A" in ASCII mean "American" ;)   
   > but my question still is: if I'd sent such characters, will you   
   > receive anything else or just interprete it different for display ?   
      
   Today, 22 years later, windows/unicode/utf8 has more or less won, but my   
   console (CMD.EXE) windows still use a different character set than   
   Windows applications.   
   >   
   >> There are similar exceptions in many other languages, and those   
   >> exceptions are the root cause behind the POPA hack: There is no other   
   >> way to lead a value into BX/SI/DI/BP which are the only registers   
   >> which can be used for memory addressing in a 16-bit program.   
   >   
   > Non-US keyboard layouts may show different signs on some caps, but I   
   > know only National special characters above 128, while 128 became the   
   > Euro-sign since a while.   
      
   The problem was that some gateways would translate to/from those 8-bit   
   chars to the 7-bit positions above 'Zz'.   
      
   I.e. since we have 29 letters in our alphabet it made perfect sense to   
   place those 3 extra in their proper collating order, directly after Z.   
      
   We have more of a problem at the other end of the alphabet where it for   
   many, many years were legal to write the last letter 'Å' with a double   
   'A', i.e. 'Aa', which still must be sorted together with letter #29.   
      
   Currently this only exists in names, but there they are quite common.   
      
   My own middle name, 'WIIG' is another funny example: It means 'VIK'   
   which is a bay (i.e. in the ocean shoreline), and it can be spelled at   
   least the following ways, all of them to be pronounced exactly the same   
   as the root word 'VIK':   
      
   VIK   
   VIG   
   VIIG   
   VIIK   
   WIK   
   WIG   
   WIIK   
   WIIG   
      
   Terje   
      
   --   
   -    
   "almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)