Bernard Hill wrote: >In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, I. Oppenheim ><[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes
>>Watch out: 156 is decimal, while the number behind the >>backslash should be the "octal code of the character", >>which is 234 (and _not_ 243, which was a typo!) > >Octal! I've not used that for 30 years, I would never have considered it >in a PC environment. Yes that's always astonished me too. I guess it's something we've inherited from abc2mtext. I suppose TeX itself was probably started back in the 70s, on Digital machines which used a 12-bit word length. Octal made sense then, since four octal digits = 12 bits. Now we use 8-bit bytes, and multiples thereof, so we use hexadecimal as a shorthand for binary (two hex digits = 8 bits). The use of octal is laughably archaic today. Kind of like the unix man command. (Sorry guys, not wanting to start a platform-specific flame war, but I'm having to learn to love unix, and man in particular is driving me crazy.) Phil Taylor To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
