It's worse than that, actually, as ASCII from the start¹ included provisions for variants for non-English latin characters and alternate currency symbols, and ASCII was essentially the same project as ECMA-6² (ECMA being the European Computer Manufacturers' Association³, a standardization group founded in 1961).

ASCII as we know it (which is essentially the 1967 version⁴) like the corresponding ECMA standard⁵ provided for overloading punctuation characters as diacritics ("/¨ ^/ˆ ~/˜ '/´ ‘/` ,/¸) to be overstruck in typewriter fashion; ECMA-35⁶ (1971⁷) defines further extension techniques using control and/or escape sequences.

So, yes, it's just a failed attempt at an anti-American cheap shot from someone who isn't familiar with the development of character set encodings.

¹ American Standard Code for Information Interchange, http://www.wps.com/projects/codes/X3.4-1963/index.html

² 7-bit Coded Character Set, http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecm...

³ http://www.ecma-international.org/default.htm

⁴ http://www.wps.com/J/codes/Revised-ASCII/index.html

⁵ 7-bit Input/Output Coded Character Set, 4th Edition is unfortunately the oldest available online; http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST...

⁶ Character Code Structure and Extension Techniques, http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecm...

⁷ Extension of the 7-bit Coded Character Set, http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST...

I'm guessing it depends on the language. In spanish we have only one type of accent and only in vowels: áéíóú, and the ñ.

The ñ is right next to the "L" key, and the tilde (accent) is either right next to the ñ or on top of it.

This adds some sort of complexity, but in my experience, the average user simple expects the key to be "where it always was" and I've had to "fix the problem" (changing the input method) many many times.

To answer your question I think that the amount of users that actually take note of what happened and understand it enough to fix it again is minimal, the rest just expect it to work and ask for help when it doesn't.

There are also a lot of variations of spanish keyboards, so it just makes the matter more complicated... I use *unix, Windows and OSx almost interchangeably and know how to change the input language in most of them to ISO spanish spanish quite quickly, but I'm not representative in that regard.

Slightly offtopic but the spanish spanish keyboard layout is extremely comfortable for programming...

No, he says that because there is no Pound, Shilling or other specific symbols for English-speaking countries, I guess.