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From: colonel@ellie.UUCP (Col. G. L. Sicherman)
Newsgroups: net.internat
Subject: Re: funny letters in funny sequences
Message-ID: <829@ellie.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 24-Feb-86 14:05:06 EST
Article-I.D.: ellie.829
Posted: Mon Feb 24 14:05:06 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 1-Mar-86 04:32:56 EST
References: <172@bu-cs.UUCP> <1176@enea.UUCP>
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>                                            (Almost: W isn't really part
> of it and oA is placed two steps wrong.) What would you think of a collating
> sequence like: 
>    A B C $ / # D E F ) = #  and so forth.

That's EBCDIC, of course.  There are two pound-signs because the committee
wanted to preserve the APL correspondence with ASCII, but weren't sure that
ANSI would use a PL/I character for the missing position on the 360 console
typewriter, and the Hollerith code for = (# in the Commercial character set)
would have conflicted with the proposed 5-bit Baudot escapes, not to mention
Russian morse code.  A sensible approach, don't you think?  |-P
-- 
Col. G. L. Sicherman
UU: ...{rocksvax|decvax}!sunybcs!colonel
CS: colonel@buffalo-cs
BI: csdsicher@sunyabva