I. Oppenheim writes:
|
| > (c) Why is £ \243? While I can of course implement it, it makes no
| > sense. Ascii £ is 156.
|
>From the iso_8859-1 man page:
Oct Dec Hex Char Description
...
243 163 A3 £ POUND SIGN
...
251 169 A9 © COPYRIGHT SIGN
One problem we seem to have is that people use \ followed
by digits to mean octal, decimal, or hexadecimal. This is
an ongoing point of confusion. There is, of course, a
totally standard way that mathematicians indicate the
numeric base, but since we can't do subscripting in plain
text, we can't use it. There's a long tradition of software
packages and programming languages using similar notation
for all three bases, but interchanging their meanings. We
could establish a standard abc way of indicating the base,
and in fact a fair amount of abc software uses \243 to mean
octal 243. But most of our users are not programmers, and
they are using all sorts of software on all sorts of
systems. So they will always be using whatever notation is
"standard" with the software they're familiar with, and we
will always be fighting this problem.
(Depressing, ain't it? ;-)
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