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From: gordan@maccs.UUCP (Gordan Palameta)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: Character representation
Message-ID: <737@maccs.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 24-Aug-87 20:08:50 EDT
Article-I.D.: maccs.737
Posted: Mon Aug 24 20:08:50 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 25-Aug-87 06:36:43 EDT
References: <15381@mordor.s1.gov> <1583@athena.TEK.COM> <8462@utzoo.UUCP>
Reply-To: gordan@maccs.UUCP (Gordan Palameta)
Organization: DCSS, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Lines: 30

In article <8462@utzoo.UUCP> henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) writes:
>
>My own personal view is that ISO Latin is a Good Thing, I am planning my
>software for it, and everybody else should too.

Yay.  Hear that, programmers?  When you write the Next Great Program
(that slices, dices, and upholsters furniture), DON'T TOUCH the eighth bit!
This means YOU!

>                                                 The various proposals
>for dealing with the non-Latin alphabets, on the other hand, all seem to
>me to have rather higher price tags, and I take a "wait and see" attitude
>toward them.

Ummm, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, and Cyrillic are or will shortly be taken care of
by the same standardization process that produced ISO Latin-1.  Each uses a
different upper half of the character set.  I think there's even standard
escape sequences suggested for switching between the different ISO character
sets, for terminals capable of displaying more than one such set. 


On a different note, the first 32 positions of the upper half of the character
set are supposed to be reserved for a bunch of new non-printing characters.
On page 26 of August 1985 BYTE, a preliminary version of ISO Latin 1 is listed,
and some of these "control" characters have names, e.g. 08/04 = IND, 08/05 =
NEL, etc.  It is implied in the accompanying letter that these are intended
for word-processing commands.

Have the uses of these been standardized?  If so, it would certainly seem
worth publicizing and discussing here.