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Re: Option Characters to binary

To: "Getting Started" <gettingstarted at lists dot realsoftware dot com>
Subject: Re: Option Characters to binary
From: "Joseph J. Strout" <joe at realsoftware dot com>
Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2003 09:04:00 -0600
References: <200311231831 dot 1ao6vb5qV3NZFl40 at penguin> <3FC1C226 dot 5000708 at ix dot netcom dot com> <7E8C8282-1E8B-11D8-8DC7-000A95983FBE at ljug dot com> <EEBCD776-1E8D-11D8-AC06-0003934EC8CC at datapanik dot com>
At 9:53 AM -0500 11/24/03, Adam Smith wrote:

ASCII is only defined of 0 through 127.

But that's not the whole story. There is also something called "Extended ASCII", which (under Windows) does include a copyright symbol.

No, actually, there isn't. Or rather, there are dozens and dozens of "extended ASCII" sets. Windows-Latin-1 certainly is one; MacRoman is another. Both of these contain a copyright symbol, but they have them at different code points. It's a mess.

That's why Unicode is such a great idea -- instead of dozens of different character sets for different uses, let's have just *one* big character set that the whole world can agree on.

Eventually, I believe all other character sets will become nothing but historical footnotes. But unfortunately right now we're in the transition period, and there is still a lot of that older stuff lying around in our files and in our brains!

Cheers,
- Joe

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|    Joseph J. Strout           REAL Software, Inc.                |
|    joe at realsoftware dot com       http://www.realsoftware.com        |
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