minow@decvax.UUCP (Martin Minow) (12/07/86)
Previously, ahe@k.cc.purdue.edu (Bill Wolfe) noted that ANSI was soliciting comments regarding a proposed 8-bit character standard. That standard, called ISO Latin 1, is now approved as ISO 8859/1, ECMA-94, or ANSI X3.134.1. It had been discussed on net.internat last year. In summary, the values from 0 to decimal 128 are identical to US-ASCII, while values from 129 to 255 contain control characters, graphic characters (such as pound-sterling) and the accented letters used in many European languages. The standard is similar to, but not identical with, the Dec "multinational" alphabet as implemented on the VT200 series terminals. Using this standard, the alphabet used for C programs does not need "trigraph" composition sequences. Martin Minow decvax!minow