Ray Devore wrote: > ASCII outmoded? > If the computer is using ASCII, it will give the ASCII > value.
Very true. However, few computers use ASCII any more. Most encodings are backwards-compatible with ASCII, and the term ASCII is still commonly used, but it's a misnomer, just like calling Chinese a "double-byte" language. First, a bit of a disclaimer. Most of what I'm going to say is applicable mostly to Windows. Mac has its own encoding scheme, and I believe Unix/Linux has moved pretty much to Unicode. ASCII is a 7-bit, English-centric encoding. It contains no provisions for German unlauted characters, Spanish accented characters, Cyrillic, Greek, Hungarian, or other languages. There was a brief time in the 1980s and early 90s when there was a flurry of "national" ascii codes, typically as a DOS add-in. Then Windows came along and used an 8-bit encoding called ANSI (American National Standards Institute). It was still Western European oriented, but it did allow for French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, etc. English DOS also had an extended ASCII that had line-drawing characters, musical notes, and happy faces. The International Standards Institute came up with ISO 8859, a set of 10 8-bit standards that encompasses almost all European languages. 8859.1 covers Western Europe and is functionally identical to ANSI; 8859.2 covers Central Europe; 8859.5 is Cyrillic, I think, and so on. When I say current encodings are backwards-compatible with ASCII, I mean that the first 127 characters are the same as ASCII. That doesn't make them ASCII, though, any more than English is French because they share a number of the same letters. I don't really mind a whole lot if people say ASCII when they mean ANSI. It's just that I've done a lot of localization, and I get rather anal about terminology sometimes. Must be the German side of my family (my mother's maiden name was Wirtz). So, yes, ASCII is outmoded, but I doubt anybody will lose their job for using the term. Cordially, Kerry Thompson To unsubscribe, send a blank message to <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/c-prog/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
