Subj : The seven-bit restriction
To   : Michiel van der Vlist
From : Bj”rn Felten
Date : Fri Jul 27 2018 01:25:02

My previous response aside.

 MvdV> It doesn't. For some time now - on my suggestion - it supports this 
option:

 MvdV> Allow8bit 1

   I know. But I don't understand why we even need this. As I said, I 
completely disabled (made a conditional zero jump) that check in my 1999 patch. 
Who would even want to *not* allow it? Get rid of all that code completely, for 
fucks sake!

 MvdV> There is just one little problem. Just as the ASCII only restriction is
 MvdV> not fair to the world outside the part where the native US English
 MvdV> speakers live, it would not be fair to restrict it to those that can
 MvdV> spell their name or city properly in CP437, CP850 or LATIN-1.

   Who cares? The nodelist will be totally backward compatible even if we put 
Chinese letters in it. Only stone-age editors, that tries to pick up recipients 
names from the nodelist based on nodenumbers, will possibly break.

   The nodelist is nothing but a database that is supposed to be read and 
interpreted by programs. Not to be read by low-ASCII brainwashed persons.

   As nodelist reading programs evolves, so should what we allow into this 
common database of ours.

 MvdV> I we allow more than ASCII, we should allow ALL Fidonet participants to
 MvdV> have their name properly spelled. Unfortunately there is no single 8 bit
 MvdV> character set that can fulfil this requirement, and having a different
 MvdV> character encoding scheme for each line is ehh.. unpractical.

   Nah, lets do it! Nobody think that the nodelist will grow bigger any more. 
So what if it suddenly becomes twice the size (as with every character 16-bit). 
Not that it will ever happen, but still, so what?

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