Le 23 avr. 07 à 19:29 Soir, Kirk Gray a écrit: > Computing spread from the U.S. outward. Since U.S. encodings had a > standard, it was easy to use it as a base for other encodings in > other countries, adding need characters in the unused (and non- > existent) "high-ASCII" range.
Just a question here: why did other encodings start from a base (the ascii)? They could keep a 7 bits scheme and be a completely-independent encoding. By the way, 8 bits is not required for an encoding, right? > The birth of microcomputers (as they were called back in the day), > created more problems with ASCII. Most agreed on ASCII as a base, > but used the un-defined higher characters for whatever seemed > appropriate to their intended audience. "High-ASCII" got filled with > space ships, smiley faces, greek letters, graphic borders, etc. Word > Perfect got very creative allowing you to switch between sets of > extended ASCII encodings depending on your need. Do you know how one can make an encoding? Say I want to make an encoding named "Arnaud" (a really strange encoding where letters are animated and in half-blue and half-green), how could I start? > Sadly Windows, Macintosh, and Postscript character sets were all > created (independently) before the international standard. So they > can still give us problems. Sometimes I wonder if they might have > been right to dump everything and start fresh. The transition would > have been rocky, but encoding problems would by now be a thing of the > past. I agree that a world without needing to specify an encoding on each string manipulation would be a dream. Thanks for sharing that! _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe or switch delivery mode: <http://www.realsoftware.com/support/listmanager/> Search the archives: <http://support.realsoftware.com/listarchives/lists.html>
