Frank da Cruz wrote on 2001-05-15 23:30 UTC:
> Not to be a stick-in-the-mud but... Private character sets that do not
> conform to the minimum international standards of structure (ISO 4873 and
> ISO 2022) have no place in information interchange, and therefore there
> is no need to register them.
Come on, the ISO-IR is already full of dozens of funny and obscure
private character sets nobody has ever seen in use. We wouldn't reduce
the aesthetics of the collection in any measurable way by adding the DOS/
Windows code pages. In addition, ISO 2022 has perfectly good mechanisms
to access the C1 control characters via the CL code value range
(0x00-0x1f). This is not only needed for when CR+GR is filled with
graphical characters (as in Windows code pages), it is also needed when
CR+GR is filled with wrong-parity-bit versions of CL+GL in 7-bit
communication systems. 7-bit communication never was a problem with ISO
2022, and so shouldn't 128 character sets be.
It would be nicer though to have 128 charcater sets properly defined as
a class of its own in a new revision of ISO 2022. If there is a separate
class of ESC sequences for activating them, then software would
automatically be aware that although C1 is now gone, C0 is still
available. That is strictly speaking not quite necessarily the case with
ESC % ... coding systems outside ISO 2022.
Markus
--
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
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Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
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