Subj : Re: What is a text character in a computer? To : comp.programming From : Roger Willcocks Date : Tue Oct 04 2005 12:19 am "Thomas G. Marshall" wrote in message news:Sja0f.15031$J03.13398@trndny05... > Roger Willcocks coughed up: >> "Thomas G. Marshall" >> wrote in >> message news:ip10f.14973$J03.1423@trndny05... >>> Roger Willcocks coughed up: >> >>>> Much confusion comes from the (mostly American) assumption that the >>>> mapping from binary number to character name is essentially fixed, >>> >>> No, "essentially fixed" is true. AFAICT, the most of the computing >>> universe still does seem to revolve around 7 or 8 bit ASCII. >>> >> >> Case proven, I believe. ASCII = _American_ standard code for >> information interchange. > > Ok. > > Ironically, I helped develop a postscript interpreter early on when there > were hardly any others than adobe, and I'm also a Java engineer. Both > lend themselves to far broader notions than ascii. > > IMO I think you're probably very correct regarding such bias and > misunderstanding; mine as well. I'll not lay as much gasoline as I > certainly could for the likely ensuing flamewar regarding /why/ that > exists except to say that much of that bias is for very good historical > reason. Like it or not, America always drove the computing landscape, and > this causes ire among engineers of all the other countries. Arogance? > Sure, I suppose. I agree that there are good historical reasons for the bias within computing, but given that the ascii character set doesn't include anything even mildly exotic, it's simply not suitable for typesetting (in any language). So while the lack of unicode support in new applications, such as PHP, could be perceived as arrogance, it's more likely to be due to a lack of understanding of the whole character encoding issue. -- Roger .