Doug Ewell wrote: > ... > There was a time, about 10 years ago, when Frank da Cruz would have > replied almost immediately about the importance of C1 controls in > terminal environments, and the arguments about incompatibility between > 8859-1 and Windows-1252 would have been off and running. > They're still important to *me* but I think I must be the last one. It's already been many years since I changed the default character encoding in my terminal emulator (Kermit 95 of course) to cp1252, because otherwise Kermit's faithful VT320 emulation would become wedged (just as a real VT320 would) every two minutes upon reception of an email containing a "smart quote" or somesuch.
Most people are not even old enough to know what I'm talking about; they came of age in a Microsoft world. They come into my office and look at my screen and ask me what I'm doing, they never saw anything like it before; screens are supposed to have spreadsheets on them, or some kind of video conference. I used to say "I'm being productive", or "I'm writing code", but nowadays the irony is lost (they don't know what "productive" or "code" mean). (I can also do UTF-8 sessions in Kermit 95 but most of the Unix host-based applications I use still don't don't handle UTF-8, or at least not adequately, but I can still switch to UTF-8 to read the occasional email -- almost always from this list -- that looks interesting.) Although Digital Equipment Corporation vanished long ago, their VMS operating system (now owned by HP) still has a large but largely unnoticed presence, and it makes heavy use of C1 controls. In any case, DEC's influence is still felt to this day in that its terminal types (VT100, 220, 320...) are widely emulated on PCs and widely supported by hosts (e.g. in Unix termcaps/terminfos). To the extent that the emulation is true, Windows code pages will break it every time. - Frank
