Here and there I read that ASCII encoding deals only with codes 0
thru 127.
So I think that it would be fine to edit the AppleScript parser (or
the Standard Additions file) so that when someone type:
ASCII character xx or ASCII number yy
it transcode them to
MacRoman character xx or MacRoman number yy
This would better reflect what we are working with.
While having 'ASCII' in the command name IS misleading, changing it
to 'MacRoman' would also be incorrect since AppleScript strings use
the host system's primary encoding which varies depending on the
settings in the International preferences pane. Come to think of it,
I'm not sure they even work correctly with multi-byte encodings...
(it's a while since I've touched them though so don't quote me on that).
It'd make more sense for Standard Additions to gently retire those
crusty old commands and add new Unicode-aware 'Unicode characters'
and 'Unicode numbers' commands like those in TextCommands. (Or heck,
you could alway try asking Apple to bundle TextCommands or something
like it in Leopard, I suppose.)
