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From: urjlew@uncecs.edu (Rostyk Lewyckyj)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy,comp.sys.amiga.programmer
Subject: Re: Here's an EASY one for you
Summary: Well ASCII is a 7 bit character set :-)
Keywords: Lazy, Lame, Arexx, Characters, pointers, Dac.
Message-ID: <1991Apr21.050018.20966@uncecs.edu>
Date: 21 Apr 91 05:00:18 GMT
References: <18f0bf14.ARN1771@prolix.pub.uu.oz.au> <1080@cbmger.UUCP>
Followup-To: poster
Organization: UNC Educational Computing Service
Lines: 49

In article <1080@cbmger.UUCP>, peterk@cbmger.UUCP (Peter Kittel GERMANY) writes:
> In article <18f0bf14.ARN1771@prolix.pub.uu.oz.au> dac@prolix.pub.uu.oz.au writes:
> >
> > I could put all 95 characters in the
>               ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> >lookup table
> >--
> 
> Ehm, I think here's a flame necessary: WHY THE H*LL DO YOU ONLY RECOGNIZE
> 95 CHARACTERS??? From my counting, the Amiga character set holds excatly
> double as many chars!!! And when I'm on my way: Why the h*ll are those
> quite normal characters always represented as dots (== non-chars) in
> hex dumps? Why?
> 
> 
> (You know what I really hate? Commercial fonts that cost big money and
> only provide those "all 95 characters". Insulting.)
> 
Well as we all know almost the whole world except for IBM decided
some 30 years ago to go with the ASCII-7bit character set. IBM had
proposed an 8 bit extended character set based on the 7 bit ASCII
character set to USASI (later renamed to ASCII). It was not accepted.
IBM itself was forced by its major customers to introduce the 8 bit
EBCDIC exension of the old 6 bit BCD code. The reason being that
there was no easy conversion path from BCD to ASCII, and the customers
had a large investment in existing data files. 
Anyways IBM went EBCDIC and the rest went 7 bit ASCII.
Well 7 bits is 128 characters which is divied up to 32 control chars.,
X'7F' the rub-out character (for paper tape), and 95 characters for
remaining uses. After all - who would ever need more :-) :-).
All those eight bit combination are not really valid characters.
The valid characters are embedded in the low order 7 bit positions
of each 8 bit byte, with a 0 high order bit.
Perhaps it's time to standardize on a larger character set, hopefully
with an extension escape hatch, hopefully more useable than the
shift in SI and shift out SO characters provided in ASCII.
 
Now does that dowse your flames? 
  
Please excuse the long tirade.
I would have left it at the one line quip about 7 bit ASCII
But I need to satisfy the posting software restrictions for
folllowups.
-----------------------------------------------
  Reply-To:  Rostyslaw Jarema Lewyckyj
             urjlew@uncmvs.acs.unc.edu    (ARPA,SURA,NSF etc. internet)
          or urjlew@unc.bitnet
          or urjlew@ecsvax.UUCP 
       tel.  (919)-962-6501