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Re: "read from" and non-lo-ascii characters
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Re: "read from" and non-lo-ascii characters


  • Subject: Re: "read from" and non-lo-ascii characters
  • From: "Dennis W. Manasco" <email@hidden>
  • Date: Tue, 28 Jun 2005 04:59:14 -0500

At 2:34 AM -0700 6/25/05, Chris Page wrote:

.... the term "high ASCII". That term dates back to at least the late 1970's, long before AppleScript or the Macintosh existed.


I first heard, and used, it around '73, but I'm certain that it was around long before that.


... 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.


Which is exactly the point: ASCII (at the time) referred to a 7-bit encoding of characters, but everyone independently (implicitly) expanded the "definition" to include encodings with the high bit set.

Low ASCII referred to standardized values below 128. High (or Hi, or HI) ASCII referred to a no-man's-land where the high bit was set and every manufacturer had a different idea of what the character should be.

Did that formalism adequately describe the encoding? No.

At the time describing the encoding wasn't a priority. You didn't have a lot of choice: High ASCII data that made sense on one machine would be garbage on another, and there wasn't anything you could do about it.

Is the phrase adequately descriptive today? Of course not.

Still, I think it's counterproductive to drub someone for using the term 'High ASCII.'

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.

That may not be an encoding-neutral phraseology, but it does make sense from a historical perspective and is a useful phrase for people working with 8-bit textual representations (which is probably still most of the western world {and I don't mean to imply that that is necessarily a good thing...})


Best wishes,

-=-Dennis












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