Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!auspex!guy From: guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris) Newsgroups: comp.sources.d Subject: Re: Why does 'stevie' mask the 8th bit ? Message-ID: <3052@auspex.auspex.com> Date: 19 Mar 90 18:48:26 GMT References: <1581@krafla.rhi.hi.is> <14602@s.ms.uky.edu> Organization: Auspex Systems, Santa Clara Lines: 36 >Programmers are just trying to make their software work on *most* >systems. For *most* systems out there, ascii only covers seven bits. ASCII only covers seven bits, period. For *many* systems outside English-speaking areas of the world, ASCII isn't sufficient. Many systems support 8-bit character sets. >There are usually good reasons for masking the eighth bit, No, there aren't. >the best being that *most* terminals go haywire when presented with 8 >bit data. That's not a very good reason at all. *Most* terminals can run in 7-bits-plus-parity-bit mode, in which case the serial port hardware strips the 8th bit off for you. *Many* terminals, when presented with 8-bit data, display ISO 8859/1 characters. >7 bits is a very established way of doing things. So was 6-bit BCD, once. Big deal. >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. No, what we guys in the US need is not to require the rest of the world to accomodate our crufty 7-bit software, but for us to accomodate the rest of the world by letting our software support 8-bit (and, at some point, 16-bit and larger) character sets. >Perhaps you need a new standard with digraphs or something. There already *is* a standard for them, with no crufty digraphs; it's called ISO 8859/1.