Re: ASCII

[Peter Evans peterev@xxxxxxxx]

Luckily for everyone my $40 modem finally gave out. But now, with a new
$50 modem, I'm back. I've Joined the Crew, with AOL 4 Free. Happy 99,
Melissa! (Chorus of "Oh gawd, where's the twit filter?")

Stephen Moore's term of "'streaming' structure" for Xy (and HTML, WordStar,
Ventura, etc.) is his personal and tentative answer to a question that I
was about to ask. But can anyone proffer a more or less accepted term for it?

Tom Hawley (tjh@xxxxxxxx):

>> Technically, XyWrite is . . . "pure 8 bit
>> coded character set". . . .

Oh? If this means: "Xy does not use any byte that's outside 0h through
FFh", true. (And trivial: it's also true for Word, WordPerfect, etc.
etc.--even, in a sense, of east Asian double-byte character processing.)

If on the other hand it means: "Xy does not use any byte for purposes other
than those defined in the IBM character set popularly known as IBM extended
ASCII", no: guillemets, the tilde and (in Xy4) character 254 are anomalous.
 (Granted, the anomaly-ratio [?] is unusually and commendably low.)

If: "Xy doesn't use any nasty control characters that would confuse a text
editor" or "Xy doesn't litter files with what seems to be randomly selected
junk" or "Xy files can be edited with streaming editors and the like and
remain readable by Xy" or perhaps just "Xy files are elegant and most
others are 'orrible", then yes.

I can't get the URL that Carlo posted to work, but here are some alternatives:

ftp://dkuug.dk/i18n/WG15-collection/charmaps/ANSI_X3.4-1968

(Yup, that's the original ASCII.)

ftp://dkuug.dk/i18n/WG15-collection/charmaps/ANSI_X3.4-1986

(And that's just about the latest ANSI ASCII.)

ftp://dkuug.dk/i18n/WG15-collection/charmaps/ISO646-US
ftp://dkuug.dk/i18n/WG15-collection/charmaps/ISO646-GB

(Two of the numerous flavors of ISO-promulgated ASCII.) I've no reason to
think that this ftp site is authorized by any official body, and indeed
there's no sign of the person or organization responsible for it, but it
certainly offers an impressive set of character sets.

Irrelevantly to ASCII, Leslie Bialler:

> Such people no doubt have VCRs still blinking 12:00.

I resemble that remark!

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Peter Evans