Re: ASCII

["Irv Thomae" irv.thomae@xxxxxxxx]

On Sat, 27 Mar 1999 22:38:50 -0700 (MST), Carlo Caballero wrote:

>
>On Sun, 28 Mar 1999, Peter Evans wrote:
>>
>> Well, in one sense of "binary", any file is binary. And I haven't seen
>> much consistency in the use of other senses. NB guillemets themselves
>> aren't ASCII.
>>
>
>ASCII 174 and 175. They aren't even above 254... But about "binary,"
>you're quite correct--it's all a world of ones and zeroes.
>
 Unh, no. The "ASCII" standard doesn't include any code values greater
than 127. Between 128 and 255 inclusive, there are a wide variety of
'standard' association sets between codes and symbols. For example, the
set used in PC's configured for use in the US has a wide assortment of
box-drawing characters, but if your PC is set up for use somehere else in
te world, some of those symbols get displaced by symbols needed in the
language(s) of the region. If you have access to the user manual for an
HP laser printer, you can find a couple dozen (of just the more _commonly_
used) "Symbol Sets" in an appendix. These correspond, more or less, to
what IBM calls "Code Pages".
  You'll find a small amount of variation in the symbols below 128, and
incidentally, symbols for codes between 0 and 32 don't count, either -
ASCII defines these as control-codes, and the symbols assigned to them on
a pC are, again, rather arbitrary.

 Irv