ASCII

[Carlo Caballero Carlo.Caballero@xxxxxxxx]

Okay, I checked it out a bit (though, mysteriously, I didn't succeed in
finding the website of the International Standards Organization), and
Peter and others seem to be right: "ASCII" refers to a set of characters
established ca. 1968, and it does not include the positions above 127. It
is properly called US-ASCII and is closely related to ISO 646. One source
that looked well-documented to me was

        www.hut.fil/u/jkorpela/chars.html

I stand corrected.

It seems, then, that the writers of the XyWrite manuals were playing loose
with terminology, too, when they penned this immortal line: "XyWrite
files are pure ASCII," which I'm sure you'll all remember.

WORDS TO LIVE BY.

For even if the terminology is wrong, the portability of XyWrite files and
their capacity to be read by so many word processors and platforms makes
me happy on a weekly basis. Even if those "upper ASCII characters"
(another misnomer, it seems) don't all display correctly on a Macintosh,
you can still search and replace. Anyone who's looked at an MS-Word file
in XyWrite (without applying a filter program) knows what's at issue here.

I wonder if someone who is more expert on character sets than I would like
to comment on how the documentation for XyWrite--among many other
sources--came to call "ASCII" all those varied extensions of the original
US-ASCII? What, then is *not* "ASCII" (in the loose sense of the XyWrite
manuals)? I've always been suspicious of the term "control codes" and
would welcome some precision.

What of Unicode, the only character set that looks truly worthy of
humanity? Do any programs use it?

Best,
Carlo Caballero

\__\__\__\__\__\__\__\__\__\__\__\__\__\__\__\__\__\__\__\__\__\__\__\__\__

                 
Carlo Caballero, Ph.D.
Research Associate
College of Music
Campus Box 301
The University of Colorado
Boulder, CO 80309

thyrsus@xxxxxxxx

"Let's face it: dead people are busier than ever."