New Extended ASCII on UNIX

[Claus Tondering]

In article <7806 at mcdchg.UUCP> gs732 at uxe.cso.uiuc.edu (Ghie-Hugh Song ) writes:
>   I've got an idea for all of us.  And I wish to write a letter to
>the ANSI people about a new 256 8-bit extended ASCII character standard.  
>
>   I understand that the standardization of 8-bit extended ASCII
>is too late.  However I know that once this is implemented on 
>the new version of UNIX or POSIX, everyone will follow
>this slowly.  Now people are gathering to standardize UNIX, POSIX, SVID,
>or whatever.  Now is the time to express our opinion to ANSI people.  
>If we lose this chance we will never have a standard 8-bit ASCII.

Your idea of an extended ASCII is not new. In fact the International
Standardization Organization (ISO), of which ANSI is a member, has already
adopted an extended ASCII character set. It is known as ISO 8859. The
idea has been to extend ASCII with various characters used in languages
other than English. Almost all non-English languages have special letters
(think, for example, of the French accented letters, the Spanish n with
tilde, etc.). ISO 8859 is actually not one standard but several:

	ISO 8859/1 is ASCII extended with the letters used in the
		   western European languages.
	ISO 8859/2 is ASCII extended with the letters used in the
		   eastern European languages.
	ISO 8859/3 is ASCII extended with the letters used in the
		   languages spoken around the Mediterranean.
	ISO 8859/4 is ASCII extended with the letters used in the
		   nothern European languages.
	ISO 8859/5 is ASCII extended with the letters used in the
		   Cyrillic alphabet (i.e. Russian, Bulgarian, etc.).
	ISO 8859/6 is ASCII extended with the Arabic letters.
	ISO 8859/7 is ASCII extended with the Greek letters.
	ISO 8859/8 is ASCII extended with the Hebrew letters.

The ISO 8859 standard is nice and useful, it is, however, unfortunate to
have 8 standards instead of just one.

Adopting your proposal will be unfortunate for two reasons:

1) It would alienate the USA from the rest of the world. If the USA used
   an extended ASCII without the national characters used in French,
   German, Spanish, etc., those countries would have to follow a separate
   path in the computer industry.

2) It would confuse the ISO 8859 abundance of standards further.


-- 
Claus Tondering
Dansk Data Elektronik A/S, Herlev, Denmark
E-mail: ct at dde.dk    or   ...!uunet!mcvax!diku!dde!ct

--------------------------------------------
[Also, in the same vein...]

 From: rja at edison.GE.COM (rja)
 Organization:  GE-Fanuc North America

  There is a 8-bit character set standard already.  ISO 8859 is it.
Most of the X/OPEN member companies are implementing support for the
western European variant (ISO 8859/1) already.  See the exchanges on this
in comp.std.internat and comp.std.unix for more details.

--------------------------------------------
[And ...]

 From: glennw at Sun.COM (Glenn P. Wright)

I think all of this has already been done in the ISO 8859 standard extension
to ISO 2022. Have you read this. In particular IS 8859/7 handles greek.

Glenn Wright {..}glennw at sun, or, {..}sun!glennw
============
Sun Microsystems Inc, Mountain View, California, USA.
Tel: (415) 960 1300