Who invented char sets?

[piratePenguin]

linux has issues starting from the shell. If you hit a multibyte key it will render one symbol, but backspacing it might erase n symbols - as it erases n bytes from the buffer as well...

When did you discover this? Do you know if it's fixed in recent bash versions or if there's a patch for it? I'd guess it is fixed/there is a patch, given the hundreds of emails I've been recieving (although not quite reading) from the LFS mailing lists about UTF-8 support in all the different packages (which they now claim to have).

[muzzy]

PP, Obviously that multibyte erase issue only applies to some cases, and there are working systems out there. I recently heard someone experiencing that, though. Goes to say that things aren't smooth yet.

Aloone, windows console supports multibyte. On my other box with japanese locale, it works almost too well. It's really disturbing to try to use ISO-8859-1 apps which try to output umlauts, as they end up turning into japanese

Calum, why do you say so? .NET has string type which is internally unicode, and conversions happen through encoding to byte arrays and so on. Thus, both C# and VB.NET internally solve the whole unicode text issue and in a completely transparent fashion. Well, as transparent as completely new programming environment can be

[Calum]

i understand what you mean, but i am taking your statement in a slightly sideways fashion. what i mean to say is, this only works when people code in those languages, and use the correct variable types and so forth as well. if one language has it fixed but people are still rattling off noncompliant programs in some other nonfixed language, then the user's still shafted.

Something should be done to force these unruly coders into compliance with proper sense! it's time to take the issue of charsets seriously! we have been silent too long!

sorry, got carried away (walks away, mumbling and straightening tie)