Subject: Re: [idn] IDN's with any ASCII character

From: Roozbeh Pournader <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 19:26:11 +0430 (IRST)

On Wed, 30 Apr 2003, John C Klensin wrote:

> While, as far as I know, "high ASCII" has never been a standard term,
> "ASCII-8" and "8-Bit ASCII" definitely have been.  And both terms are
> still used informally, both inside and outside the US, to refer to the
> Standardized form of Latin-1, i.e., ISO 8859-1.

May be true, but the terms are dangerous, as in different cults they mean
different things. For example, for older PC & MS-DOS hackers the 8-bit
ASCII means CP437.

roozbeh

---

From: John C Klensin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 13:36:02 -0400

--On Wednesday, 14 May, 2003 19:26 +0430 Roozbeh Pournader 
<[email-masked]> wrote:

>> While, as far as I know, "high ASCII" has never been a
>> standard term, "ASCII-8" and "8-Bit ASCII" definitely have
>> been.  And both terms are still used informally, both inside
>> and outside the US, to refer to the Standardized form of
>> Latin-1, i.e., ISO 8859-1.
>
> May be true, but the terms are dangerous, as in different
> cults they mean different things. For example, for older PC &
> MS-DOS hackers the 8-bit ASCII means CP437.

The _only_ thing I was trying to clarify was the apparent 
assertion in Doug's note that ASCII-8 wasn't well defined in 
some standard.  It was and is.  I wouldn't suggest using the 
term either.

      john

---

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 May 2003 23:14:11 -0700

> some standard.  It was and is.  I wouldn't suggest using the

BTW, to the extent anyone cares, there actually was an encoding called
"ASCII-8" or "USASCII-8" that emerged shortly after the introduction of
ASCII in 1963.  It was not an attempt to extend ASCII to 256 characters,
though, but rather an attempt to represent ASCII in 8-bit streams using
a strange parity-bit-inspired scheme:

ASCII characters 0x00-0x1F were represented by bytes 0x00-0x1F
ASCII characters 0x20-0x3F were represented by bytes 0x40-0x5F
ASCII characters 0x40-0x5F were represented by bytes 0xA0-0xBF
ASCII characters 0x60-0x7F were represented by bytes 0xE0-0xFF

It was based on ASCII-1963, which differs in a few character positions
from the 1967 version we know.  Some other early systems solved the
then-important "parity problem" by making the high bit an odd or even
parity bit.  Eventually, the "8-bit ASCII byte" came to be defined as
having its high bit reset to 0.

-Doug Ewell
 Fullerton, California
 http://users.adelphia.net/~dewell/