On Jun 28, 2005, at 02:59, Dennis W. Manasco wrote:
Still, I think it's counterproductive to drub someone for using the
term 'High ASCII.'
Sometimes, consistent drubbing is necessary to get the message through.
:-P
Seriously, it's productive to try to turn people away from using a term
that is at best technically incorrect and in informal usage misleading
and vague. Letting it slide for a few decades certainly hasn't helped
anyone write correct programs or fix bugs faster.
It's immediately obvious what they are talking about: 8-bit
representations of characters with the high bit set where, without bit
7 set, the representation would be ASCII.
Not at all. That was one of the points I addressed. In many cases,
people mean some particular 8-bit character set and encoding, and not
knowing which one that is leaves it open to (incorrect) assumption. In
fact, if someone says they've got "high ASCII characters" I've got to
assume they may not in fact know exactly what character set or encoding
they're using and there may be more points that need clarification--or
more bugs lurking in their code--beyond whatever they happen to be
specifically discussing.
