>>>" becomes @ and vice versa
>>>
>>>There's no £ key
>>>
>>>and a few minor differences.
>>
>>But for really desperate, when they run out of booze, I'd recommend installing Belgian or Hungarian keyboard layout. Works better than alcohol - after a few rounds you feel like a bumbling idiot, at no cost at all :).
>
>International keyboards are a major PITA.

And the most international one is ASCII - used in US, Canada, Australia (I presume - they may be using the British), and probably a few other nations - and former British colonies plus any nation whose language doesn't use diacriticals. The next would be the French layout, being used by half of Belgium, parts of Switzerland and many former colonies. Russian may also be used by more than one nation.

I'd truly recommend national keyboard layouts, like Japanese, Serbian, Thai, Greek etc, as they have no chance of becoming international.

(I can pretend to be serious for a few paragraphs more, if you have the patience ;).

>I once worked really hard on a FP/M app that totally failed at its first demo because of &*%^*&^% French keyboards.
>
>You see, on French Mac keyboards, the numeric row is backwards. The numerals are all shifted. FP/M disallowed data entry in numeric fields if the shift key was pressed.
>
>So I get this panic call from Paris about the app not working. My immediate suggestion, like any good nerd, was to use the numeric keypad. Of course, they were demonstrating the app from a Powerbook which didn't have numeric keypad. <g> (That company later bought external numeric keypads for their French users. <g>)

Actually the trouble is purely historic... from 7-bit character sets to 8-bit to 16-bit... and lack of forethought. 640KB shou... 64 characters should be enough for everything.