I wrote:
>> Even 8-bit ASCII is a correct term meaning ISO-8859-1.
>
> I would question that. Understandable, yes, but not really correct.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> No, it *is* correct. ANSI X.3 (which has a new name these days) in fact
> did define an 8-bit American Standard Code for Information Interchange,
> being exactly the same as ISO 8859-1.
>
> Of course, that does not affect the definition of the 7-bit American
> Standard Code.
Meanwhile, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> In the computer culture I grew up, 8-bit ASCII meant CP437. Every author
> called the CP437 table that was available at the end of computer books the
> ASCII table.
And perhaps the Mac people think of MacRoman as "8-bit ASCII." The 8-bit
extensions to ASCII are just that, extensions -- they are not ASCII. Even
ISO 8859-1 cannot be called "the" 8-bit ASCII -- if it were, there would be
no need for ISO 8859-2, -3, -4, -5, etc.
Of course, it could be worse. Ten years ago, one of the WordPerfect experts
at my work had a name for all those strange Greek, Cyrillic, box-drawing and
happy-face characters that were listed in Appendix Z of the manual and had to
be entered with a special {x, y} key sequence. She called them "the ASCII
characters."
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
