Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!caen!spool.mu.edu!cs.umn.edu!kksys!edgar!brainiac!jrc From: jrc@brainiac.mn.org (Jeffrey Comstock) Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d Subject: Re: ALED goes to the wastebasket here in Iceland Message-ID: <1991Jun22.020306.2825@brainiac.mn.org> Date: 22 Jun 91 02:03:06 GMT Article-I.D.: brainiac.1991Jun22.020306.2825 References: <3257@krafla.rhi.hi.is> <3271@krafla.rhi.hi.is> Organization: Sewer of Source Code Lines: 21 In article <3271@krafla.rhi.hi.is> einari@rhi.hi.is (Einar Indridason) writes: >In article nelson@clutx.clarkson.edu (aka NELSON@CLUTX.BITNET) writes: >>In article <3257@krafla.rhi.hi.is> einari@rhi.hi.is (Einar Indridason) writes: >> >> >And you touch uppon another part of the problem. ASCII. We know what that >stands for: American standard code for information interchange? >Notice that 'American' word. ASCII is 7bit. I can admit that. But that >is no excuse for masking the 8th bit. My advice is: don't mask the 8th bit >but handle it as you would any other character. Because almost all computers ( except for CBM and that PETSCII abortion ) are guarenteed to use the same characters in the 'ascii character range'. This means that you can read a document on almost any computer. Just the other day I was trying to view a document about an AT bus card on a Sun workstation. They used all those 'pretty', non-ascii characters to box in certain phrases, and the document was very hard to read. If you start using non-ascii characters, you might as well forget about viewing a document on a different architecture machine. At least high bit-stripping software makes documents 'portable'. -- Jeffrey R. Comstock