If this has been discussed somewhere before, just tell me where to search - it doesn't come up in the archives of the misc, etc. mailing lists...
Because I work from a number of locations and computers which have inconsistent ideas of what UTF-8, ISO8859-1, etc. mean for character codes above 0x7E, I'd like to be able to set my LOCALE to a 7-bit one so that vi, etc. will not try to display something which will probably be confusing or inconsistent. I noticed that the default ctype_.c is not a "C" 7-bit locale but something resembling 8859-1, and that the file .../src/share/locale/ctype/en_US.ASCII.src is not normally compiled by the Makefile. Is there a reason the en_US.ASCII locale is not available in the standard distribution? As an aside, many other unix-like, BSD-derived, or other POSIX-like implementations default to a 7-bit "C" locale. Since many developers are in non-US locations, I can believe that it's more convenient to set the default "isprint()" functionality to call many 8-bit characters printable. I can't find anything in the C standard which requires either behavior. POSIX does specify that the "C" locale defines a portable 7-bit set of characters as printable. It would perhaps be a little less surprising if OpenBSD supplied a 7-bit "C" locale and set the default login locale to an 8859-1 one, but there are probably good reasons not to do it that way. Thanks for any information! geoff steckel
