(11-23-2022, 06:43 PM)Spriggsy Wrote: I don't know if it is necessarily bragging to state facts like there being more French speaking people than Greek. It just makes for a good case of supporting a larger language first since there would potentially be a greater reach.
In fact, on this subject, it looks like IBM's original extended ASCII character set consists entirely of one-byte characters and is by default supported by MS QBasic/QuickBasic and QB64. It does a nice job supporting French, Spanish, Italian (Spanish and Italian are comparatively easy to please with accent requirements), but a poor job with German, Scandinavian, and all the rest who use the Roman alphabet. And the few Greek characters supported are just barely enough for math and physics (for example, where are lower case gamma and lambda?).
As far as I can tell, the UTF-8 standard begins with the IBM extended set, but it replaces characters 166 on up to 255 with "more useful" accented characters. To support both Roman and Greek characters well, it looks like it takes two-byte characters, to fit in many of the Greek characters. So that's a significant addition, two-bytes/character as opposed to just one. If QB64 can be made capable of that, my hat's off to you guys.