intnl: Character sets
Scot E. Wilcoxon
sewilco at mecc.UUCP
Sun Nov 3 15:59:50 AEST 1985
I think John's on the right track. We don't need to just decide on a
character set representation. We also need to decide what needs to be
changed in UNIX. You'll see two similar articles here: character sets
and UNIX commands.
Partly for the sake of discussion, I'm suggesting the NAPLPS protocol as
the character set standard. It allows 7 or 8 bit data streams, and uses
escape codes for character set extension. Graphics are part of the
standard and their device-independent resolution exceeds that of a
phototypesetting machine. Comments?
In article <224 at l5.uucp> gnu at l5.uucp (John Gilmore) writes:
>In article <6066 at utzoo.UUCP>, henry at utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) writes:
>> > As far as character sets go, it would seem that 16 bits (65536
>> > possible characters) should be more than enough...
>> The trouble with this (and the other similar proposals) is it asks the
>> Western world to pay a factor of 2 in storage overhead for the sake of
>> the Asian character sets.
>I think the proposals are that a coding scheme for text be defined which
>allows 16-bit characters to be escape-coded into an 8-bit text stream.
>The arguments mostly center on what kind of coding scheme would fit both
>the needs of few-16-bit-char folks and few-8-bit-char folks without wasting
>too much storage for either.
>
>Internally to an international program, characters would be 16 bits,
>but stdio routines (printw, fprintw, sscanw, etc) would encode to a
>bytestream on the way in and out. ("w" for "world" or "wide").
>
>(Hmm, the non-Unix-opsys people have been looking for a way to tell when
>we Unixoids are reading or writing a text file versus a binary file...now
>that we propose encoding our own text files, they will have the clue.)
(I'm biased towards NAPLPS because I have Viewtron's free Commodore-64
NAPLPS decoder program. Not very biased..if the net comes up with a
new standard there'll be plenty of software for it. Kick my straw man.)
--
Scot E. Wilcoxon Minn. Ed. Comp. Corp. circadia!mecc!sewilco
45 03 N / 93 15 W (612)481-3507 {ihnp4,mgnetp}!dicomed!mecc!sewilco
More information about the Comp.unix
mailing list