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From: minow@mountn.dec.com (Martin Minow)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: ASCII for national characters
Message-ID: <1073@mountn.dec.com>
Date: 20 Nov 89 14:36:51 GMT
References: <472@enea.se>
Reply-To: minow@mountn.UUCP (Martin Minow)
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation
Lines: 40

In article <472@enea.se> sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog) writes:
>
>Salmela Jarmo (js@kaarne.tut.fi) writes:
>>PS. The ASCII standard that supports national characters is really
>>needed.
>
>Well, ASCII supports all national characters it can think of.
>I.e, American.

ASCII is, strictly speaking, the "national character set" for
the United States.  It's one of a family of "national character
sets" standardized under ISO-646.  National standardization
authorities are empowered to define 12 (if I remember correctly)
of the character positions to suit their country's needs.  For
example, the United Kingdom replaces the "number sign" by "Pound
Sterling", while the Scandinavian countries define the character
positions past 'Z' and 'z' to support their national letters.

VT200/VT300 compatible terminals generally support about a dozen
different national replacement sets.

The standardization bodies realized in the early 1980's that ISO-646
was not a satisfactory solution, and built on the Dec Multinational
character set to form ISO Latin-1, along with a structure that will
define a family of 96 character supplemental sets.  (ISO/ECMA has
standardized about a dozen sets for Slavic, Lappish, Greek, and Hebrew,
among others.)

There are long-term plans to develop a 32-bit "universal" character set
that can be used to communicate among all written languges.  Much of
that space will be used for the Asian ideographic languages (China,
Taiwan, Korea, and Japan).  ISO 10646 is the working title of that
standard.  (No, you won't have to buy more memory: there will be
control sequences to let you select a slice of the character set space.)

Hope this clarifies matters.  This note does not represent the position
of Digital Equipment Corporation.

Martin Minow
minow@thundr.enet.dec.com