Asmus Freytag <asmusf at ix dot netcom dot com> wrote: >> A code page is not, in general, >> the same as an encoding scheme. > > What is, then, the proper definition of a "code page"?
I might not be able to do better than Potter Stewart here. I think of a code page as a deliberately targeted subset of all encodable characters, such that different "pages" make up the whole "book." The Unicode Glossary uses the example of MS-DOS code page 437; the concept wouldn't apply unless other pages existed, covering different repertoires. > Later, it was realized that in order to specify what encoding data > were in or, for example, to specify a conversion from UTF-7 and UTF-8 > to UTF-16 (native encoding scheme) one needed some suitable ID number > to identify the mapping. Well, extending the code page id was the most > natural way to do that, because, on several platforms, the use of a > numerical ID from the IBM code page registry was established practice. I don't think the existence of numeric identifiers for Unicode encoding schemes suffices to make them "code pages." -- Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, USA http://ewellic.org | @DougEwell
