Dear Michael Kolodin,
 
 Thank you for your two replies of 19 August. I became
 aware of them only a few days back on visiting the
 archive:
 
 https://info.vsu.ru/Lists/CyrTeX-en/List.html
 
   << :) Alas, it [MS Win cp1251]  HAD variants, because
 \"E, \"e were sometimes place in different places. >>
 
 Well, well, and your keyboard seems to be an example
 of that:
 
  > cyrillic unshifted:...
  >
  > £1234567890-=\
  > ÊÃÕËÅÎÇÛÝÚÈß
  > ÆÙ×ÁÐÒÏÌÄÖÜ
  > ÑÞÓÍÉÔØÂÀ.
  >
  > cyrillic shifted:
  >
  > ³!"?;%:?*()_+/
  > êãõëåîçûýúèÿ
  > æù÷áðòïìäöü
  > ñþóíéôøâà,
 
  << (you need to have Cyrillic driver to read this, note:
 the same driver as I have :) >>
 
 Let us test that.  Does my ASCII-Cyrillic utility
 correctly decodes your keyboard as:
 
  > !cyrillic !unshifted:...
  >
  > !^^a31234567890-=\
  > KGXLEOZY'EQI'A
  > 'Z'WCBRTPMD'TH
  > S'UUNJFWVA.
  >
  > !cyrillic !shifted:
  >
  > !^^b3!"?;%:?*()_+/
  > kgxleozy'eqi'a
  > 'z'wcbrtpmd'th
  > s'uunjfwva,
 
 It would seem that \"E='O and \"e='o are in TeX3
 notation the octets ^^a3 and ^^b3 which are exotic J and
 i respectively in the table for cp1251 that I posted, while
 \"E='O and \"e='o are are ^^a8 and ^^b8 in that table.
 Clearly some flexibility in en/de-coding is wanted!
 I hope TeX will be able to offer that for ASCII-Cyrillic.
 
  > but in Cyrillic version the layout of chacarters differs
  > fro that is printed on the keys, I had to write
  > characters on the keys myself... :(
 
 Ouch!.  But I mentioned that the French keyboard is a
 disaster for scientific users in several respects.
 
 I am grateful for your spelling out the perfectly standard
 nature of Latin (=English=programmer) registers of your
 keyboard:
 
 latin unshifted:
 `1234567890-=\
 qwertyuiop[]
 asdfghjkl;'
 zxcvbnm,./
 
 latin shifted:
 ~!@#$%^&*()_+|
 QWERTYUIOP{}
 ASDFGHJKL:"
 ZXCVBNM<>?
 
 That is the standard US keyboard offering excellent access
 to ASCII.  I once purchased a US keyboard for
 Macintosh and it is almost identical -- except that the
 key with TeX's backslash is at the end of the second row
 not the first. West European keyboards are not as good
 for programmers and TeX users!
 
 I confess that I was toying with the idea of using ` in
 ASCII-Cyrillic where I currently use "!".  That would
 have placed all three escape characters ' ! \  of
 ASCII-Cyrillic on the unshifted register of the
 US keyboard.
 
              Thanks again for your expos'e!
 
                  Laurent Siebenmann