The D Programming Language

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

In article <12059 at brl-adm.ARPA>, dsill at NSWC-OAS.arpa (Dave Sill) writes:
> Am I the only person in the world that thinks it's time to scrap ASCII?
> The time is ripe for a more flexible "Code for Information
> Interchange".  How many more years/decades will we be forced to make
> do with a lousy 95 symbols: all predefined, most vastly overloaded?
> Even deciding on a new standard will be hard/expensive/time-consuming,
> but it's *got* to be done sooner or later.

It has already been done.  DIS 8859/1 (it may be a full ISO standard by now)
is an 8-bit extension of ASCII.  DEC already have it (almost) and SUN are
moving in that direction.  At long last we have a *standard* character set
where C-with-a-ring-around-it is an actual character.  The System V
Interface Definition hints that 8-bit characters will be an official part
of some future System V.