slightly OT: Re: My single quote key is misbehaving

[D. Michael McIntyre]

On Thursday 29 November 2007, Det wrote:
> See: No clue why they made languages so different from each other:
> Each language could be written with the same simple character set.  ;-)

It is funny how it all works.  I think all the characters for German and 
definitely for French exist in the Spanish keyboard layout, but not for 
Portuguese (the various vowels with a tilde would seem to be a deal breaker 
off the top of my head, but I don't know enough Portuguese to have tried 
this.)

I think it must all be a legacy from the typewriter days.

> As a german software developer used to type in 10-finger system,
> I'm always switching between german and US english keyboard layout,
> because the often used special german characters (umlauts) aren't available
> on the english one, OTOH typing program code (with {}[]\ a.s.o.) is a pain
> on a german layout.

Same with the Spanish layout.  It's a lot faster to switch layouts than to 
keep doing all the acrobatics to get a { again and again.  People using a 
plain English keyboard have a real advantage here, and switching is so easy 
these days...

-- 
D. Michael McIntyre