From: mutazilah@gmail.com
"Janis Papanagnou" wrote in message
news:10fuh3c$100up$1@dont-email.me...
> 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.)
Sorry - I used the wrong word (I'm not fluent in terminology).
I don't want a Greek user to ever switch LAYOUTS, even
when using MY English-only software.
Also note - what I am trying to do is more "icing on the cake"
than "base functionality". As you noted - people can already
enter their name in Greek.
What they can't do is "press X to continue".
> (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.
If the Greeks had invented computers (and had a population
of 90% of the globe), there is little doubt that the bottom
128 code points would be Greek characters, and English
characters would be in the top 128.
The prompt "enter your name" would be in Greek.
I don't wish to learn Greek, as I'm in that 10% of the globe,
and I'm not a programmer.
> > 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".
A traditional Greek codepage is one from the late 1980s.
You named an ISO one - probably that.
A non-traditional Greek codepage is one that I just made
up right now. I'm going to put the Greek "micro" at code
point x'F3'. For no particular reason.
Or maybe the reason is that I want to store the box-drawing
characters, plus some other things, and ISO doesn't have
something that does exactly what I want.
> (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.)
Yes - what (some) people call "extended ASCII".
> > 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: ???????
>
> And the binary/encoded representation shall be, say, ISO 8859-7 ?
Yes - correct. That all works already.
The C89/C90 people got MOST stuff working already. All
the blatantly obvious stuff works already.
They didn't have the luxury of 35 years of thinking about
the same topic.
> 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).
Sure.
> (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.)
Sure - that all works.
> > 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.)
Sure - I'm not interested in how that is done.
> > 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?
Yes - almost.
The problem comes about in my English-only programs - that
support Greek - mostly - by C90 accident.
Assuming setlocale(LC_ALL, ""); is in effect, anyway.
> > 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.)
Ok.
> >>> 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: ???????
> 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.
No - none of that is correct. I want the 8-bit Greek characters.
> (I still don't see where you actually see or have the problem.)
Ok, so here's another one.
As a Greek user, I want to be able to type:
dir /od
in Greek gibberish.
I literally bring an OS to the table - PDOS (see pdos.org).
I have no intention of creating a Greek translation of "dir".
But I would also like the Greek user to have the OPTION
of NOT changing keyboard layouts, and STILL be able to
use PDOS.
What I can do is uppercase the string "dir /od", and then
in my code I can do strcmp() with "DIR".
That covers ME PERSONALLY.
It doesn't cover a Greek person - they would have to
change layouts.
They can't just press the Greek character at location "d"
on the US ASCII keyboard, which will generate a "micro"
or whatever.
[continued in next message]
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