Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!mordor!sri-spam!sri-unix!quintus!ok
From: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: The D Programming Language
Message-ID: <723@cresswell.quintus.UUCP>
Date: 3 Mar 88 02:29:14 GMT
References: <12059@brl-adm.ARPA>
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Mountain View, CA
Lines: 13

In article <12059@brl-adm.ARPA>, dsill@NSWC-OAS.arpa (Dave Sill) writes:
> Am I the only person in the world that thinks it's time to scrap ASCII?
> The time is ripe for a more flexible "Code for Information
> Interchange".  How many more years/decades will we be forced to make
> do with a lousy 95 symbols: all predefined, most vastly overloaded?
> Even deciding on a new standard will be hard/expensive/time-consuming,
> but it's *got* to be done sooner or later.

It has already been done.  DIS 8859/1 (it may be a full ISO standard by now)
is an 8-bit extension of ASCII.  DEC already have it (almost) and SUN are
moving in that direction.  At long last we have a *standard* character set
where C-with-a-ring-around-it is an actual character.  The System V
Interface Definition hints that 8-bit characters will be an official part
of some future System V.