dlawyer@balboa.eng.uci.edu (David Lawyer) (02/02/90)
In article <1990Feb1.172916.16504@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes: > >How you set the values for the high characters [above ascii DL] is a good >question. All >zeros appears to be legitimate, and might be the simplest thing. (I'm >tempted to say that the values should follow ISO Latin 1, but that's >asking for trouble since lots of hardware isn't set up to deal with >ISO Latin 1 yet.) What about ISO Latin/Cyrillic 5? I found the Minix book by AST is in a Russian book catalog and will be printed in Russian. Will not they need Russian (Cyrillic) characters? The problem with this standard is that the high control characters (0x80-0x99) are apparently not used for printable characters. These 32 characters could possibly be assigned to many of the non-ascii West European letters (ISO 5 already includes East European letters). Dave Lawyer
henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) (02/03/90)
In article <4527@orion.cf.uci.edu> David Lawyer <dlawyer@balboa.eng.uci.edu> writes: >>...tempted to say that the values should follow ISO Latin 1... > >What about ISO Latin/Cyrillic 5? I found the Minix book by AST is in a >Russian book catalog and will be printed in Russian. Will not they >need Russian (Cyrillic) characters? The problem with this standard is >that the high control characters (0x80-0x99) are apparently not used >for printable characters. These 32 characters could possibly be >assigned to many of the non-ascii West European letters... ISO Latin 1 fills the 96 high non-control characters with, mostly, non-ASCII Western European letters, and *still* doesn't quite cover all the Western European languages. Trying to make a token gesture in that direction with 32 characters is not worthwhile, especially when it results in a non-standard character set. Is there some reason why the Russians deserve special treatment? Why not, say, the Greeks? (As I recall, they have an ISO Latin/xxx N set all to themselves.) How about Hebrew? Hindi? Arabic? You simply can't get all the useful character sets into 8 bits even if you ignore the Oriental languages. Latin 1 gives about the widest coverage you can hope for in an 8-bit set; it covers most major languages of five continents (since said languages mostly are Western European languages or at least use Western European alphabets). -- 1972: Saturn V #15 flight-ready| Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology 1990: birds nesting in engines | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu