Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: ASCII
Message-ID: <1988Oct24.201751.19602@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <347@spies.UUCP> <670025@hpclscu.HP.COM> <24355@bu-cs.BU.EDU> <1991@stpstn.UUCP> <381@infmx.UUCP> <24566@bu-cs.BU.EDU> <3989@rlvd.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 24 Oct 88 20:17:51 GMT

In article <3989@rlvd.UUCP> caag@inf.rl.ac.uk (Crispin Goswell) writes:
>>ASCII is ASCII anywhere....
>
>Not in Europe it isn't. Pick up a manual for a Japanese matrix printer some
>time: you'll find at least ten variants...

The original statement stands:  ASCII is ASCII everywhere.  This is not
changed by the deplorable tendency to slap the label "ASCII" on anything
that happens to resemble ASCII in some way.

>Even in versions of ASCII for the same country you sometimes find that a
>subset of &$#^~\_{}[]` get variously interchanged on printers or VDUs.

These character sets are not versions of ASCII.  They are instantiations
of the ISO 7-bit set; ASCII is another such instantiation.

ASCII is a single, well-defined, well-specified character set, with no
significant variations allowed.  And by and large, existing implementations
of it follow the standard fairly well.  There are a wide range of 8-bit
character sets that have ASCII as a subset, but the ASCII inside them is
generally pretty pure.  (ASCII is defined as 7 and only 7 bits, so these
character sets are ASCII+XYZ, not variants of ASCII.)  There are also a
number of other 7-bit character sets related to ASCII, in that they too
are instantiations of the ISO 7-bit set, but they are not ASCII, and only
marketing turkeys pretend that they are.
-- 
The dream *IS* alive...         |    Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
but not at NASA.                |uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu