Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ogicse!ucsd!rutgers!mit-eddie!bloom-beacon!eru!luth!sunic!liuida!isy!lysator.liu.se!aronsson
From: aronsson@lysator.liu.se (Lars Aronsson)
Newsgroups: comp.std.misc
Subject: Re: Int'l Character set (Was: Re: filen
Message-ID: <106@lysator.liu.se>
Date: 28 Jun 90 11:41:30 GMT
References: <10720@<1990Jun1> <17000002@WL9.Prime.COM> <1679@mountn.dec.com> <91@lysator.liu.se> <1676@hulda.erbe.se>
Sender: news@isy.liu.se (Lord of the News)
Organization: Lysator Computer Club, Linkoping University, Sweden
Lines: 34

prc@erbe.se (Robert Claeson) writes:

>As far as I know, ISO 2022 is mostly intended to be used for information
>*transfer*, not *processing*. Your word processor should convert the
>data read from the file into whatever internal format is appropriate
>for the operations you want to perform on it.

You are absolutely right. Transfer is the INTENT. Every new standard
has an quite limited scoop intended and as you stick to it everything
is fine.

RS-232 was intended to connect modems to terminals or modems to hosts.
But when you start connecting terminals to hosts, you get a lot of
trouble with the asymmetry of that standard (null modems etc).

Now, ISO 8859 is intended for sequential transfer of readable text.
Unfortunately, Sun Microsystems (and probably others aswell) will soon
(has already?) start to ship operating systems (SunOS 4.1), where ISO
8859 is used for internal storage, e.g. in text files. Under UNIX,
most common text editors (like emacs) do not scan the entire file to
be edited, but use random access.

Is it the manufacturers who are stupid as they use standards outside
their intended scoop or is it standard authors who are stupid as they
write standards with too narrow scoop? I think standards should be
versatile. I think EIA (CCITT) should have written a general,
symmetric standard for serial links rather than the RS-232 (CCITT
V.24). I think that ISO should have written a general standard for
storing and random order retrieval of text (that is, no escape
sequences) rather than the six versions of ISO 8859. Perhaps, I am
stupid.

Lars Aronsson
     Aronsson@Lysator.LiU.SE