Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!world!decwrl!ucbvax!TRANSARC.COM!Craig_Everhart From: Craig_Everhart@TRANSARC.COM Newsgroups: comp.soft-sys.andrew Subject: Re: 8-bit characters, how to use ? Message-ID: Date: 9 Nov 90 14:34:16 GMT References: Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 23 Indeed, unscribe.c is not part of ATK at all, but has been a wart on the side. It is used by several non-ATK programs (the AMS message server, AMDS, CUI, VUI) that don't need the overhead (distribution-time, build-time, and execution-time) of getting involved in dynamic loading. Fortunately, unscribe makes no pretensions at being able to invert its transformations. It does enough interpretations that doing so would be impossible. Thus, a run through UnScribe is a known way to lose information. As you suggest, the issue for a mail gateway is non-trivial, and the reason is the same reason that the ``customary local replacements'' are important. Does 8-bit RFC822 mail really solve any problems? What are recipients in Germany supposed to do with Swedish e, since their displays can't handle it? What are they supposed to do with upside-down question marks (?)? We would always have the problem of the ``local extensions,'' no? I could imagine doing worse things than reading the local-extensions table in unscribe. Craig