rhg%regina@plus5.UUCP (10/04/85)
hokey, regarding the several ideas that you proposed recently: 1) x3.64 is now widely recognized as a starting point, but it does not solve all of our problems. this is shown by the wide introduction of 'code extentions' such as NAPLPS and Teletex. 2) internally, i.e. the storage problem, there are no differences between x3.4 1968 and x3.4 1977 and ISO 646, nor the various other national standards such as the French, German, Swedish, etc. the differences come up in the graphic rendition of these codes which depend (mostly) on the i/o devices themselves. i say 'mostly' because of the recent trends toward dowloadable fonts, looks, etc. thus i see no need, whatsoever for a $characterset special variable, because it has no meaning. 3) the issue of collating outside of the 7-bit ascii set has been introduced into fortran 77. prior fortrans have depended upon the native collating sequence of the machine, i.e. a non-standard collating sequence was built into the fortran language. now fortran 77 requires the addition of ascii collating sequence relational operators IN ADDITION to whatever normal, usual, non-standard operators are built into the language. e.g. normal fortran x.lt.y where both x and y are character strings. answer depends on 'native' collating sequence. required ascii llt(x,y) where both x and y are character strings. answer depends on ascii collating sequence. the above semantics are correct, there may be minor syntactic and naming errors since i didn't look up the exact function names. cobol has also added a mechanism to employ various collating schemes as an option. this too is a trend away from native collating sequences. i am not sure that it is a good idea to move mumps away from the ascii collating sequence (which is one of the long standing strengths of the language) toward various non-standard native sequences such as EBCDIC. this is especially true when other standardized languages are now finally moving toward ascii standardization and away from native sets. respectfully, bob PS: WITHIN SEVERAL DAYS I CAN ALSO BE REACHED ON AN IBM MACHINE ON BITNET - RHG at UREGINA1 . AFTER A LONGER PERIOD OUR UNIX MACHINE (THIS ONE - regina) WILL PROBABLY ALSO HAVE A BITNET CONNECTION. THE USE OF BITNET WILL LOWER OUR COSTS AND WILL GREATLY SPEED MESSAGES ALONG SINCE IT EMPLOYS LEASED LINE SERVICE. YOU MAY WISH TO CONSIDER LINKAGES TO THE WASH U IBM MAINFRAMES TO GAIN THIS ADVANTAGE FOR YOURSELVES TOO.