Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!mcsun!isgate!krafla!marius
From: marius@rhi.hi.is (Marius Olafsson)
Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d
Subject: Re: why does ms_sh mask the 8th bit ?
Message-ID: <1636@krafla.rhi.hi.is>
Date: 14 Apr 90 17:42:13 GMT
References: <1613@krafla.rhi.hi.is> <2730001@hpgnd.HP.COM> <1741@cybaswan.UUCP> <1387@hulda.erbe.se>
Organization: University of Iceland
Lines: 19

prc@erbe.se (Robert Claeson) writes:

>They already run 8-bit news in Iceland. As I understand it, there is a set
>of patches available in Iceland to make B news 2.11 use 8 bit characters.
>Rn isn't that easy to patch, though. And the Icelandic patches doesn't
>(again, as I understand it) allow for ISO 2022 character set shift sequences
>to be used to transparently shift among different character sets.

This is correct, our patches simply consist of cleaning up the code to use
the ctype macros (ctype.h) for all character classifications, and then use
an ISO8859/1 version of these macros when compiling. The patches to the
news system itself were trivial (inews, etc..) and only slightly worse for
the readers (vnews, vn, rn and nn).

We have no mechanism to shift among different character sets as 8859/1
is the standard character set here and a prereq for connection.
--
Marius Olafsson 		internet: marius@rhi.hi.is
University of Iceland		UUCP:     {mcsun,sunic,uunet}!isgate!rhi!marius