draft ANSI standard: one change that would *really* help Europe

[Bill Wolfe]

In article <1382 at hoptoad.uucp>, gnu at hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) writes:
> While considering my point of view on trigraphs, Laura Creighton pointed
> out that the problem is that Europeans really need more than a 7-bit
> character set.
> 
> In that vein, one possible change to the ANSI standard would require
> "char" to be unsigned.  This would double the number of characters
> that a strictly conforming program could easily handle, and European
> Unix systems could use an 8-bit character set in which the first 128
> characters were USASCII.  I believe that the various Unix
> internationalization efforts are already doing working in this direction.

  Actually, as mentioned in Byte magazine about 9-10 months ago, ANSI is
  in the process of soliciting comments regarding its proposed 8-bit ASCII
  standard, which does contain 7-bit ASCII as its first 128 characters, and
  includes all the European characters in the upper 128...  check the Letters
  section of Byte, around February 1986 or so for the exact positions of the
  various characters in the proposed standard...
  
				      Bill Wolfe (ahe!k.cc.purdue.edu...)
					   
				      Purdue University Computing Center