Vad är en dator?

"Do we have to live without the special letters in our language?!!"

Within Scandinavia, for example, it quite often happens that people use the å, ä and ö, and that they arrive in the same state as when they were sent out. But as things are today, there's a price to pay for communication between computers made for different countries, with different operative systems, and which are of different ages: and that is that you have to accept a limitation on how far you can use local variations of the latin-based alphabet.

All computers used today agree on a basic set of 128 characters - and then you might think that there would be room for an alphabet of 28 letters in there somewhere: but the standard was developed in a context where people didn't recognise that the difference between a, ä and å  was actually important than the set of little rabbits, apples, sharp signs and suchlike which programmers like to play with...

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