brucec@orca.UUCP (Bruce Cohen) (07/23/83)
Yes. There are a lot of small, subtle differences, including some sections added to deal with conformance and how to subset the standard. There are several fairly large changes, such as the requirement for a color map even in color mode 1. I can't recall all of the differences right now, but there are a fair number. The basic functionality is unchanged (there are no new character sets, or new PDIs, for instance), but there are enough differences that an implementor would do well to throw out the Bell spec. In my opinion, the ANSI document, dense as it is, is much more readable than the Bell version, in part because of the addition of some illustrations to *show* what the graphics are supposed to look like. If there is a magazine editor out there who wants to publish an article on the technical differences between the specifications, I'd be willing to do it, but a point for point analysis would bore most of the people in this newsgroup, and would be a lot of work, especially as I would practically have to go through the documents line by line to find all the changes, so I won't bother. Anyone else out there is welcome to do it. Bruce Cohen UUCP: ...!teklabs!tekecs!brucec CSNET: tekecs!brucec@tektronix ARPA: tekecs!brucec.tektronix@rand-relay
brucec@orca.UUCP (Bruce Cohen) (07/25/83)
Correction to minor technical detail, for anyone who cares: it's color mode 0 that had the color map added; color mode 1 always required it. As an aside, why do people insist on numbering things from 0? Is this an attempt to be esoteric? I always thought that the reason for labeling arrays from 0 was to make the offset within an array be easily and intuitively computable. This doesn't seem to map well into the realm of counting things, as the high incidence of "off-by-one" errors in programming shows. Bruce Cohen UUCP: ...!teklabs!tekecs!brucec CSNET: tekecs!brucec@tektronix ARPA: tekecs!brucec.tektronix@rand-relay