Subj : Re: archic character in inputrc
To   : comp.os.linux
From : Sybren Stuvel
Date : Fri Jun 18 2004 11:48 pm

Niy enlightened us with:
> Is this something like ASCII?

From Jargon File (4.2.3, 23 NOV 2000) [jargon]:

  ASCII /as'kee/ n.  [originally an acronym (American Standard
  Code for Information Interchange) but now merely conventional]
  The predominant character set encoding of present-day computers.
  The standard version uses 7 bits for each character, whereas most earlier
  codes (including early drafts of ASCII prior to June 1961) used fewer.
  This change allowed the inclusion of lowercase letters -- a major {win}
  -- but it did not provide for accented letters or any other letterforms
  not used in English (such as the German sharp-S
    or the ae-ligature which is a letter in, for example, Norwegian).
  It could be worse, though.  It could be much worse.  See {{EBCDIC}}
  to understand how.  A history of ASCII and its ancestors is at
  `http://www.wps.com/texts/codes/index.html'.
  
From Jargon File (4.2.3, 23 NOV 2000) [jargon]:

  ANSI /an'see/ 1. n. [techspeak] The American National
  Standards Institute. ANSI, along with the International Organization
  for Standards (ISO), standardized the C programming language (see {K&R},
  {Classic C}), and promulgates many other important software standards.
  2. n. [techspeak] A terminal may be said to be `ANSI' if it meets the
  ANSI X3.64 standard for terminal control.  Unfortunately, this standard
  was both over-complicated and too permissive.  It has been retired and
  replaced by the ECMA-48 standard, which shares both flaws.  3. n. [BBS
  jargon] The set of screen-painting codes that most MS-DOS and Amiga
  computers accept.  This comes from the ANSI.SYS device driver that must
  be loaded on an MS-DOS computer to view such codes.  Unfortunately,
  neither DOS ANSI nor the BBS ANSIs derived from it exactly match the
  ANSI X3.64 terminal standard.  For example, the ESC-[1m code turns on
  the bold highlight on large machines, but in IBM PC/MS-DOS ANSI, it
  turns on `intense' (bright) colors.  Also, in BBS-land, the term `ANSI'
  is often used to imply that a particular computer uses or can emulate
  the IBM high-half character set from MS-DOS.  Particular use depends on
  context. Occasionally, the vanilla ASCII character set is used with the
  color codes, but on BBSs, ANSI and `IBM characters' tend to go together.
  
Sybren
-- 
The problem with the world is stupidity. Not saying there should be a
capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the
safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?

.