At 13:48 10/27/2005 -0700, Andrew Lentvorski wrote: >> (If you look at the ASCII encoding, a lot of work went in to making >> it *sensible*. It's not a simple enumeration of the available glyphs.) > >Riiiiight. So, how many of the 32 characters do we actually use below >ASCII 0x20? And somehow everybody uses the C representations like "\0" >rather than the ASCII "NUL". Quick, which C character is CR and which >is LF? Not very mnemonic. [snip]
I think you are unjustly impugning ASCII here by ignoring the historical context. ASCII was invented to provide communication to teletype style devices over a serial connection, and it was pressed into service as a code for use inside of computers. Looking at the bit patterns for ASCII, one can see how easy it is to build a simple keyboard encoder, especially things like the shift function (I've built one from TTL). People will also rag on EBCDIC by convienently ignoring the historical context in which it evolved. The real problem here is that of trying to preserve backward compatability because no one wants to throw this stuff away and start over. Gus -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
