Re: "read from" and non-lo-ascii characters
Re: "read from" and non-lo-ascii characters
- Subject: Re: "read from" and non-lo-ascii characters
- From: Chris Page <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 02:34:56 -0700
On Jun 23, 2005, at 12:41, Paul Berkowitz wrote:
And, let's be fair here, ...
Let's not :-)
... maybe the predilection for referring to that range as "high ASCII"
is at least partly due to the Standard Additions "ASCII character" and
"ASCII number" which just so happen to cover the full range 0-255.
Not to sound argumentative, but I don't think that's related to why
people use the term "high ASCII". That term dates back to at least the
late 1970's, long before AppleScript or the Macintosh existed.
But, of course, you bring up a very important point, that AppleScript's
terminology for mapping between characters and integers has always been
incorrectly named and is sorely overdue for an overhaul. My guess is
that that was probably a consequence of earlier programming languages
like BASIC, which had (and still have) a function named "ASC", which
returned the numeric value for an ASCII character. I suppose when the
first BASIC was designed, it may have indeed been working exclusively
with ASCII characters, but certainly as early as the age of the Atari
800, Apple ][+, Commodore 64, and TRS-80, each of which had some
version of BASIC available, this function was already misnamed, since
each of those computers had its own, incompatible 8-bit character set.
That is to say, when AppleScript was created, existing programming
languages -- and people in the computer industry in general -- already
had a rich tradition of misusing the term "ASCII". When I get a time
machine, the first thing I'll do after making millions of dollars in
the stock market will be to go to Dartmouth and have them name the ASC
function something else.
--
Chris Page - Software Wrangler - Dylan Pundit
The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree,
is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals.
We cause accidents. -- Nathaniel Borenstein
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