Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uunet!mcsun!isgate!krafla!einari From: einari@rhi.hi.is (Einar Indridason) Newsgroups: comp.sources.d Subject: Re: Why does 'stevie' mask the 8th bit ? Message-ID: <1589@krafla.rhi.hi.is> Date: 20 Mar 90 17:49:55 GMT References: <1577@krafla.rhi.hi.is> <1581@krafla.rhi.hi.is> <14602@s.ms.uky.edu> Reply-To: einari@rhi.hi.is (Einar Indridason) Organization: University of Iceland (RHI) Lines: 66 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. >7 bits is a very established way of doing things. > Ok. I admit that some terminals go haywire when using the 8th bit. But can you programmers not make it switchable. For example by using an environment variable: (for example) EXT-ASCII=1 if the terminal can use the 8th bit without going haywire. EXT-ASCII=0 (or undefined) if the terminal goes haywire with the 8th bit. >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. >Perhaps you need a new standard with digraphs or something. There are 20 'special' icelandic characters that need to fit into the 7-bit ASCII. Some of them can be accomdated by using one letter, backspace and then an umlaut, others would have to replace existing characters such as: {[]}. (I absolutely refuse to write a letter using digraphs: "Kj??#r kve?? h???li." :-) In the old days, when PC machines were starting to be the state of the art, we had a character set like that. On Apple II there was a switch beneath the keyboard and by using that switch you could change '[' into 'AE' (unprintable in 7-bit ASCII !!!), ']' into 'Thorn' (again unprintable in 7-bit ASCII !!!) and back again. Confusing ? What if you were a programmer on the Apple (and other machines), and you intended to use the 'special' icelandic characters? You would need to switch back and forth, while looking at your code. Not to good. The development of ISO-8859/1 was a step in the right direction. In that standard are all icelandic characters (and most of those that are used in Europe). The icelandic characters are located in the higher half of 255 characters. (Extended ASCII) I once grabbed a tiny editor of 'comp.binaries.ibm.pc' I tried it out, but when it could not handle the 'special' icelandic characters, it went straight and unrecoverable to the waste-basket. So, the tendence is to allow the 'special' characters. YOU, AMERICANS: WAKE UP. Not all of the world is happy with the 7 bit 'American Standard Code Information Interchange' We *NEED* the 8th-bit software. So in the future PLEASE allow for 8-bit characters. (Optionally maskable for those stray terminals that go haywire when presented with an 8-bit character.) --- I just learned a new curse: "You #$@! son of SCROLLBAR!" Internet: einari@rhi.hi.is | 'Just give me my command line and throw UUCP: ..!mcsun!isgate!rhi!einari | the GUIs in the dust-bin!!!!!!!!!'