Re: ASCII vs. MacRoman (was Re: Standard Additions 'read' command - basic questions)
Re: ASCII vs. MacRoman (was Re: Standard Additions 'read' command - basic questions)
- Subject: Re: ASCII vs. MacRoman (was Re: Standard Additions 'read' command - basic questions)
- From: "John W. Baxter" <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 19 Jan 2004 18:25:25 -0800
- Envelope-to: email@hidden
On 1/19/2004 16:07, "Walter Ian Kaye" <email@hidden> wrote:
>
I would too, if only to end the long-running grave-vs-quote debate.
>
(I say: since it's on the tilde key, it's a grave accent. Period.)
>
I'd also like to know why the 8-bit ASCII standard was withdrawn.
The ` is the unshifted ~ now, but that's a fairly recent development vs
ASCII. (The Apple //e keyboard had them together down at the bottom left of
the keyboard...but that too is recent vs ASCII.)
Probably lack of interest and lack of consensus killed 8-bit ASCII (with the
advent of Unicode, no one had time to think about simple encodings). (Would
either Apple or Microsoft have given in?...not likely...particularly since
neither character set was suitable even for all of Europe. And by the time
the standardization was attempted, there were other players with turf to
protect. Remember all the Hollerith card code variants [A, B, and F being
the major ones...NCR had a lulu of its own (right paren was 3-4-5) but there
were several others]. The industry does this sort of thing.
The 7-bit ASCII in an 8 bit environment standard almost didn't make it (but
IBM went home rather than preventing consensus...one of the few standards
debates IBM lost in those days). (My office sharer was NCR's rep on the
committee which turned 7-bit ASCII into 8-bit.) (IBM wanted bit 8 to be a
copy of bit 6 (counting one-based from the right of the byte). Take a look
at what that does to various assumptions about character values.
When they couldn't have that (they had zero backers among the committee,
after discussion) they took their ball home and inflicted EBCDIC on a
generation of programmers (EBCDIC similarly breaks the alphabets up with
junk in the middle of each).
Much to IBM's annoyance, the first label on an ANSI standard (reel-to-reel)
tape had to be in ASCII...that label could declare that the rest of the tape
(or just the other labels) was EBCDIC, but it had to be ASCII itself.
--John
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