Hi All,
My company is developing a new programming language targeted at continuing with the original charter by the C language for development of Operating Systems in a HLL as well as applications, device drivers etc. This language has an extended character set and, although all of the key words will (still) be in English, identifiers (i.e. names of things) can use additional European characters (such as those with accents, diaeresis, cedilla etc). For efficiency, a 254-character subset of them are going to be used in creating a character space that encodes them into a single byte. These will not only be automatically byte-endian independent but will also be in alphabetic order so that sorting can take place directly on their numeric values. What I need from you is input so that I can select the most appropriate set for the benefit of European programmers who are obviously very talented at what they do. My thought is that it would be great if European programmers could give names to variables etc. in their own native languages that have more meaning for them than just plain old English words. The character subset includes full upper and lower case Greek as well as Cyrillic. I have seen Cyrillic (as well as Greek) with various accent marks (presumably used by eastern European countries)but there is not enough space in a byte to add any of these. However, I have added quite a few to the basic Roman character set that is used so much in English. Since I am an American, I don't have full appreciation for all of these special marks and symbols and that is why I am asking for your comments. I apologize for the low resolution of the glyphs (8 X 16). I do have a TrueType version in the works but it is incomplete. In the table, columns
0-8 are Roman and its variants. Greek is columns 9-B. Cyrillic occupies columns C-F. I was surprised how neatly these fell into columns. A reference on the subject of European character sets would be much appreciated. For those of you who are happy to give me feedback, I have attached a table that I have been using that represents the current subset used for identifiers. You may respond directly to me or to the news group for all to see. Much thanks to you.Regards,
Paul King McKneely technoventure, inc.