One thing that has frankly never been very clear to me is why
none of the Europeans who are unhappy about the large installed
base of ISO-646 variants has built a conversion lookup table into
their MTA that sends the data across the wire as ISO-8859-1
and converts it to the local ISO-646 variant if necessary at
display time. The number of glyphs is small enough to fit in
a static array lookup table even on a small machine. Since the
size is quite small, the performance shouldn't be noticable
-- especially since most of the ISO-646 equipment is video
terminals connected via RS-232-like serial lines.
Ran
atkinson(_at_)itd(_dot_)nrl(_dot_)navy(_dot_)mil