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From: ForthNet@willett.pgh.pa.us (ForthNet articles from GEnie)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Input/Output
Message-ID: <2946.UUL1.3#5129@willett.pgh.pa.us>
Date: 30 Jun 91 20:12:14 GMT
Organization: (n.) to be organized.  But that's not important right now.
Lines: 37

Category 10,  Topic 23
Message 15        Sun Jun 30, 1991
B.RODRIGUEZ2 [Brad]          at 12:31 EDT
 
Obviously Len Zettel's reply and mine have "crossed in the email." Many
thanks, Len, for the commentary, and I hope that if your understanding of
BASIS17 is incorrect (which I doubt), some other TC member will jump in here.

a) You've answered all my number-representation questions.  (Except one: who
uses ones-complement these days?)

b) I found your comment re. character sets a bit confusing:
 > If your system handles a character specified in ASCII as a number
 > from hex 20 to hex 7E, the number has to correspond to the
 > character in the [ISO-646] table.

Does this mean that a) if your system uses ASCII, it has to use ISO ASCII, or
that b) if your system uses any characters which can be represented in ASCII,
it has to use the ASCII coding?

Put another way:  must the letter "A" be represented as 41 hex in a standard
system?  Or can I use EBCDIC coding, as long as I don't use character codes in
the range 20-7E hex?

c) As I understand your remarks, the phrase TRUE FOO C! FOO C@ would not
return a well-formed flag, and could not be used in the ANSI standard for the
kernel, but it _would_ conform to the ANSI standards for programs.  That is,
standard _programs_ can be written using character variables for flags.  Is
this correct?

- Brad

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