Re: 'sort' command-alternative?
Re: 'sort' command-alternative?
- Subject: Re: 'sort' command-alternative?
- From: Chris Page <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2002 17:40:36 -0700
On Sunday, October 6, 2002, at 12:50 PM, John Delacour wrote:
At 11:54 am -0700 6/10/02, John W Baxter wrote:
At 18:01 +1000 10/6/2002, Shane Stanley wrote:
and how things like high-ASCII characters are handled
That's easy...they don't exist and so aren't handled.
NON-ASCII characters exist, and it is interesting to know how
THEY are handled.
That is not the case. US-ASCII stops at $7F and this plus the
remaining 128 characters comprise EXTENDED ASCII, the display of
the characters having 1 as the first bit of 8 being dependent on
the character set in question. So far as I'm concerned, it is
perfectly in order to refer to these code-points as hi-ascii or
whatever and the meaning will be clear. If it were not, you would
have been unable to deny their existence!
There is no such thing as "EXTENDED ASCII". There is ASCII, which
contains values 0-127, and there are myriad other character sets,
some of which contain more than 128 values. ASCII data is often
stored or transmitted in 8-bit octets, but this is unrelated to the
ASCII standard. They can just as easily be represented in 7-bits
without loss of information, and there is nothing preventing
someone from storing them in 10, 12, 16, 32, or any other number of
bits greater than 7. If you have any supposedly ASCII data stored
in 8-bit octets with the high bit set, that data is by definition
using some encoding or character set other than ASCII, or is
embedding ASCII values within some data format that uses the high
bit for some purpose other than representing ASCII values.
By using vague pseudo-terms like "high-ASCII" or "extended ASCII",
it becomes difficult to provide helpful answers, because what we
really need to know is what character set is actually under
discussion, and neither of these terms refers to a standardized
character set. In the context of Mac OS, people often mean
"MacRoman", but this is not always the case.
--
Chris Page - Mac Guy - Palm, Inc.
This is software development we're talking about here.
"Picky" is our mantra.
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