On 23-Apr-07, at 11:39 AM, Arnaud Nicolet wrote: > 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?
Some use 8, 16, 24 or 32 bits depending. UTF-8 has a variable sized encoding and uses 1, 2, 3 or 4 bytes depending on the code point. Some are fixed size (UCS-2 or UCS-4) >> 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? You could invent your own and implement it simply as a lookup table > 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? Ahhh .... a FONT and an ENCODING are not the same thing. Some fonts do not have glyphs (characters) for all code points Switching the font does not affect the encoded data, just it's appearance. You could make a font that is as you describe (although most fonts do no have capabilities to have animated characters) >> 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. If you can get everyone to use UTF-8 it should handle pretty much everything. It's one good reason to try and use it where and when you can. _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe or switch delivery mode: <http://www.realsoftware.com/support/listmanager/> Search the archives: <http://support.realsoftware.com/listarchives/lists.html>
