> If any > criticism was present, it referred to the redundant "US-" prefix in > "US-ASCII", not to Unicode, and even that wasn't really criticism, just my > lack of understanding /why/.
In addition to Doug's historical clarification, you need to understand this as a perfectly normal linguistic process of attributive disambiguation of a term which had grown ambiguous in usage. Many, many people using computers, including some software engineers, don't even know what the acronym ASCII stands for, or that the "A" was derived from "American" originally. ASCII proliferated into parlance meaning basically the default 7- or 8-bit character set of personal computers (<== note that that term itself is now archaic and disappearing), and in particular the common set of characters printed on most keycaps. In some contexts, ASCII meant and still means "not EBCDIC". "US-ASCII" was invented as a term, I believe, in part to tie usage back explicitly to ANSI X 3.4, whose repertoire is identical to U+0000..U+007F, including the implied usage of a particular set of ISO 6429 controls for C0 ... and opposed to ISO 646 IRV, or any particular national variant of ISO 646, including even the US variant of ISO 646, or Code Page 437, or some other unspecified "ASCII" code page. --Ken
