From: nowhere@never.at   
      
    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 see, so you might have problems to mail ASM and C-source without   
   having backslash, square and curly brackets.   
      
   > 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 'Ã…' 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   
      
   funny variants :)   
   You may know the German alphabet got seven specials (äÄöÖüÜß) which   
   I have to enter as extended ascii because I work only on US-101 keyboards,   
   just for not breaking my fingers to type []{}\| on a german kbd.   
   __   
   wolfgang   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)