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From: lum@osupyr.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: ASCII supersets (Re: Flat Portable)
Message-ID: <236@osupyr.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 8-Feb-87 15:41:49 EST
Article-I.D.: osupyr.236
Posted: Sun Feb  8 15:41:49 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 9-Feb-87 04:48:30 EST
References: <275@netxcom.UUCP> <1249@ucbcad.berkeley.edu> <197@osupyr.UUCP> <7591@utzoo.UUCP>
Reply-To: lum@osu-eddie.UUCP (Lum Johnson)
Organization: The Ohio State University, IRCC/CIS DEC-2060
Lines: 21

In article <7591@utzoo.UUCP> henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) writes:
>> [L]et's add a _real_ META (ie, 8th bit set) key ..., for Emacs.
>
>Let us not forget that the days of real 8-bit character sets are almost
>upon us.  The ISO Latin set, now an ANSI standard as well, will solve a
>lot of problems, and software design which precludes its use (e.g. taking
>the 8th bit for something else) is extremely shortsighted.

Agreed, but super-ASCII has been in use for quite awhile by GNU Emacs (8-bit)
and for more than a decade by its predecessor ITS/Twenex Emacs (9-bit).

The proper solution is to provide a keyboard that produces a full character
set, ASCII, ISO Latin, etc, and allows setting the "bucky bits" above those
actually used for character representation.  For example, a 10-bit ISO Latin
keyboard with META and TOP bucky bits.

Of course, most machinery won't deal with 10-bit bytes yet.

Lum Johnson

lum@ohio-state.arpa  lum@osu-eddie.uucp  ..!cbosgd!osu-eddie[!osupyr]!lum