Re: (no subject)

["M . Thielker" <balsa t-data com>]

Hi Brian,

On 2001.07.18 11:44 Brian Stafford wrote:
> If someone can explain to me why French does not require accented
> characters but "French French" does, I'd be interested to hear it. ;)
> 

It's as simple as it's stupid! fr, FR, fr_FR are all _incomplete_ locale
specifiers.
A locale is defined as a country (fr), and underscore and a charset (FR), a
dot and a codepage that determines the characters encoding.

fr_FR.850 is a complete locale specifier.

It tells us that we are in France (duh), want to use a French charset and
encode it according to the western european codepage.

Since codepages have reasonable defaults, they can be left out. That's why
fr_FR will suffice while fr will not.

This stuff has been around since long before unicode and other NLS support,
it really dates from IBM's introduction of MODE in PC-Dos

Before that, unix was ASCII all the way, it wasn't even possible to display
or process national characters with Coherent unix, for instance. There was
just no way to enter them because the keymap didn't support that.

Now we have to live with the crimes of our forebears, wich include "locale"
settings.

Melanie