Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcsun!sunic!tut!jt19840 From: jt19840@tut.fi (Tuomi Jyrki Juhani) Newsgroups: comp.sources.d Subject: Re: Why does 'stevie' mask the 8th bit ? Message-ID: <3250@tutor.tut.fi> Date: 19 Mar 90 16:29:44 GMT References: <1577@krafla.rhi.hi.is> <1581@krafla.rhi.hi.is> <14602@s.ms.uky.edu> Reply-To: jt19840@tutor.tut.fi (Tuomi Jyrki Juhani) Organization: Tampere University of Technology, Finland Lines: 48 In article <14602@s.ms.uky.edu> sean@ms.uky.edu (Sean Casey) writes: >einari@rhi.hi.is (Einar Indridason) writes: > >|I just forgot. Here in Iceland we can't (as yet) FTP around the world. > >|PROGRAMMERS: PLEASE DON'T *MASK* the 8th bit !!!!! > >Programmers are just trying to make their software work on *most* >systems. For *most* systems out there, ascii only covers seven bits. >There are usually good reasons for masking the eighth bit, the best >being that *most* terminals go haywire when presented with 8 bit data. Well, this certainly isn't the case with IBM-PC implementation, as the upper 128 chars are clearly defined as line drawing, international alphabet, and other special characters. I also assume (could be wrong, though) that ST, and Amiga have similar facilities. I really wonder about the *most* systems in Sean's posting. How many did you count :-? I could also say, that *most* systems I have been using, allow eight bit characters, like PC compatibles, MACs, DEC VAXen, etc. And they are running the same s/w as in the US :-) >7 bits is a very established way of doing things. Very true, things are changing, however. There is an international standard for eight-bit characters (ISO Latin-1), and e.g. DEC has had eight-bit characters in their systems for years (different from ISO :-( ). Someone else probably knows more about how busily Unix vendors are (or are not) incorporating 8-bit character support in their systems. >What you guys in iceland need is not to require the rest of the world >to accomodate you, but for you to accomodate the rest of the world. Yeah, and us in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Greece, Canada, etc., etc., etc... Even British can't have their pound sign in 7-bit ASCII... Yeah, we certainly need to accomodate the U.S. (oops, the rest of the world). >Perhaps you need a new standard with digraphs or something. Why don't we just stick with the current 8-bit character standard in those environments that provide it and mask the 8th bit only when necessary (e.g. via a conditional compilation option is source files). -- Jyrki Tuomi Internet: jt19840@tut.fi UUCP: ..mcvax!tut!jt19840