> > On 7/30/2013 3:27 PM, Asmus Freytag wrote: > > > architectures that depended on swapping character sets (code > > > pages) in mid stream > > > > I thought systems were usually married to a particular code page. I'm > > wondering where (historically) you'd actually change to a different > > code page mid-stream. > > ISO 2022 allows it. For historical reasons, the emacs input method > definitions are full of such code switches. ... > > Richard.
To add to Richard Wordingham's examples, many legacy database architectures supported (and still do support) code pages. In most such contexts, rather than "swapping character sets... in mid stream", such architectures involve configuring a particular database to use a particular code page (one among many that in principle the software could support), and then dynamically configuring each connection made to that database to match a client's character set against the database character set, and doing conversions as required as text passes up or down the connection. These kinds of systems are widely deployed, but the endgame we are all working towards (and in large part have achieved) consists of servers configured in Unicode and clients connections configured in Unicode. Conversions still may be going on, but more often of the UTF-8 <--> UTF-16 type which preserve all data, instead of spitting out multiple instances of uninterpretable "?" characters when client and data source don't match. --Ken
