the biggest problem for computer users around the world was other alphabets. ascii's english alphabet almost accommodates european languages, if accented letters are replaced by non-accented letters or two-character approximations. modified variants of 7-bit ascii appeared promptly, trading some lesser-used symbols for highly desired symbols or letters, such as replacing "#" with "£" on uk teletypes, "\" with "¥" in japan or "₩" in korea, etc. at least 29 variant sets resulted. 12 code points were modified by at least one modified set, leaving only 82 "invariant" codes. programming languages however had assigned meaning to many of the replaced characters, work-arounds were devised such as c three-character sequences "??(" and "??)" to represent "{" and "}". languages with dissimilar basic alphabets could use transliteration, such as replacing all the latin letters with the closest match cyrillic letters (resulting in odd but somewhat readable text when english was printed in cyrillic or vice-versa). schemes were also devised so that two letters could be overprinted (often with the backspace control between them) to produce accented letters. users were not comfortable with any of these compromises and they were often poorly supported.