caag@inf.rl.ac.uk (Crispin Goswell) (10/11/88)
In article <24566@bu-cs.BU.EDU> madd@bu-it.bu.edu (Jim Frost) writes: >In article <381@infmx.UUCP> aland@infmx.UUCP (Dr. Scump) writes: >|And *what* is the big problem with EBCDIC, except that "it's not ASCII"? > >How about the "n" different versions of EBCDIC? It's an IBM standard >and yet it's different on the three different types of IBM hardware I >use (IBM System/32, System/23 Datamaster, and System/34, 36, and 38). >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. (Please do not remind me that Japan is not part of Europe). Even in versions of ASCII for the same country you sometimes find that a subset of &$#^~\_{}[]` get variously interchanged on printers or VDUs. I would hazard a guess that the only reason that EBCDIC is still used is that the installed base using EBCDIC is about as big as (or probably bigger than) the installed base using ASCII. Depressing, isn't it? -- Name: Crispin Goswell |-------|__ Informatics Department Usenet: {... | mcvax}!ukc!rlinf!caag | Tea | | Rutherford Appleton Lab JANET: caag@uk.ac.rl.inf \ Mug /_/ Chilton, Didcot ARPA: caag%inf.rl.ac.uk@nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk \_____/ Oxon OX11 0QX, UK "Break out the Jet-pack Umbrellas!" - The Penguin
ok@quintus.uucp (Richard A. O'Keefe) (10/23/88)
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)".)