8-Bit ASCII Standard on UNIX-POSIX

[Moderator, John S. Quarterman]

From: uunet!harvard.harvard.edu!haddock!karl (Karl Heuer)

In article <10317 at uunet.UU.NET> gs732%uxe.cso.uiuc.edu at uxc.cso.uiuc.edu (Ghie-Hugh Song ) writes:
>Have you ever dreamed that TeX were more WYSWYG or that you could type
>Greek characters in the text mode directly?  If we had an extended
>256 8-bit ASCII character set such as IBM PC's. (See Appendix of
>PC DOS Manual), things would be much easier.

Well, actually I've wished for a *lot* of non-ASCII characters at various
times.  More than you can fit in the 128 available slots.  But most of them
are so seldom used that I don't mind that they don't have reserved 8-bit
values.

>For the 7-bit terminal environment, in which 8-bit signals are not generated
>or received by the terminal, such as VT100, it is desirable for the C-shell
>or the editor to have a key which tells the host computer that the next key
>is one of the upper 8-bit codes (128-255).  This key should not contradict
>with a control key of the existing editor programs.

There is no such key.  (Yes, Emacs *does* distinguish between C-m and C-j.
Besides, on most keyboards the big key labeled RETURN or ENTER generates C-m,
so if you preempt that for a pseudo-meta, you'd have to use an explicit C-j
(awkward to type) to get a newline.)  Not that it matters -- such editors
normally run in raw mode anyway, so they'd be bypassing the new feature.

>In addition to this new extended ASCII, I think that some of the present
>ASCII characters should be redesigned from the present ones as follows:
>[suggests, among other changes, that /\_| should be stretched to fit the
>character cell]

If you want line-drawing characters, add a line-drawing font.  Don't try to
make the ASCII set do double duty.

>... You might have noticed that the UNIX 'man'ual pages contain '^H' in their
>text files for underlining.  It seems now fully supported by most ANSI
>terminals.

Oh?  Underlining with backspace is not unheard of, but I think the escape
sequence \e[4m is more common, especially among "ANSI terminals".  Perhaps
you're confused by software that does this conversion for you (e.g. "more")?
And certainly very few terminals (hardcopy excepted) will display general
overstrikes like a cent sign.

Volume-Number: Volume 13, Number 41