On 2/12/2012 10:13 AM, Roy Smith wrote:
Exactly.<soapbox class="wise-old-geezer">. ASCII was so successful
at becoming a universal standard which lasted for decades,
I think you are overstating the universality and length. I used a
machine in the 1970s with 60-bit words that could be interpreted as 10
6-bit characters. IBM used EBCDIC at least into the 1980s. The UCLA
machine I used had a translator for ascii terminals that connected by
modems. I remember discussing the translation table with the man in
charge of it. Dedicated wordprocessing machines of the 70s and 80s *had*
to use something other than plain ascii, as it is inadequate for
business text, as opposed to pure computation and labeled number tables.
Whether they used extended ascii or something else, I have no idea.
Ascii was, however, as far as I know, the universal basis for the new
personal computers starting about 1975, and most importantly, for the
IBM PC. But even that actually used its version of extended ascii, as
did each wordprocessing program.
> people who
grew up with it don't realize there was once any other way. Not just
EBCDIC, but also SIXBIT, RAD-50, tilt/rotate, packed card records,
and so on. Transcoding was a way of life, and if you didn't know what
you were starting with and aiming for, it was hopeless.
But because of the limitation of ascii on a worldwide, as opposed to
American basis, we ended up with 100-200 codings for almost as many
character sets. This is because the idea of ascii was applied by each
nation or language group individually to their local situation.
> Kind of like now where we are again with Unicode.</soapbox>
The situation before ascii is like where we ended up *before* unicode.
Unicode aims to replace all those byte encoding and character sets with
*one* byte encoding for *one* character set, which will be a great
simplification. It is the idea of ascii applied on a global rather that
local basis.
Let me repeat. Unicode and utf-8 is a solution to the mess, not the
cause. Perhaps we should have a synonym for utf-8: escii, for Earthian
Standard Code for Information Interchange.
--
Terry Jan Reedy
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
