Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!teknowledge-vaxc!sri-unix!quintus!ok
From: ok@quintus.uucp (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: AT&T Joining OSF - ASCII
Message-ID: <564@quintus.UUCP>
Date: 23 Oct 88 06:05:56 GMT
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>
Sender: news@quintus.UUCP
Reply-To: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Inc.
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In article <3989@rlvd.UUCP> caag@inf.rl.ac.uk (Crispin Goswell) writes:
>In article <24566@bu-cs.BU.EDU> madd@bu-it.bu.edu (Jim Frost) writes:
>>ASCII is ASCII anywhere....

>Not in Europe it isn't.

ASCII is indeed ASCII anywhere.  Goswell is probably confusing ASCII
with ISO 646, the international standard.  ISO 646 leaves 10 of the
printing character positions unspecified "for national use"; these
include [ \ ] { | } # and some others I cannot remember.  ASCII is
the USA instantiation of ISO 646.  There are also French, German,
Spanish, Scandinavian, &c instantiations of ISO 646, which disagree
with ASCII (and each other) on the assignments of those character
positions.  ASCII itself has no variants.

The good news for ASCII-lovers is that the new ISO standard, ISO 8859,
is an 8-bit character set whose lower half is identical to ASCII (no
differences allowed).  The upper half is language-area-specific:  one
variant is ISO 8859/1 which is pretty close to DEC's "Multi-National
Character Set".  ISO 8859/1 covers most of the languages in Western
Europe, and ISO 8859/1 is ISO 8859/1 anywhere...

AT&T promised back when the SVID came out that they were going to be
"internationalising" UNIX.  (If you have V.3, see if you have "isort(1)".)