On Thursday, May 26, 2016 at 1:41:41 PM UTC+5:30, Erik wrote: > On 26/05/16 02:28, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote: > > On Wed, 25 May 2016 22:03:34 +0100, Erik > > declaimed the following: > > > >> Indeed - at that time, I was working with COBOL on an IBM S/370. On that > >> system, we used EBCDIC ASCII. That was the wierdest ASCII of all <ducks> ;) > >> > > It would have to be... Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code, > > as I recall, predates American Standard Code for Information Interchange. > > > > EBCDIC's 8-bit code is actually more closely linked to Hollerith card > > encodings. > > I really didn't think it would be necessary to point this out (I thought > the "<ducks>" and emoji would be enough), but for the record, my > previous message was clearly a joke. > > To break it down, Stephen was making the observation that people call > all sorts of extended ASCII encodings (including proprietary things) > "ASCII". So I took it to the extreme and called something that had > nothing to do with ASCII a type of ASCII. > > As they say, if one has to explain one's jokes then they are probably > not funny ...
JFTR I found the comment hilarious and even thought of incorporating it into http://blog.languager.org/2014/04/unicode-and-unix-assumption.html but could not find a smooth place to do so. [Mad run: Intensive course to run next week] -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list