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From: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith)
Newsgroups: net.internat
Subject: Re: What do we REALLY want?
Message-ID: <2004@phri.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 6-Nov-85 09:16:46 EST
Article-I.D.: phri.2004
Posted: Wed Nov  6 09:16:46 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 8-Nov-85 06:06:26 EST
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Organization: Public Health Research Inst. (NY, NY)
Lines: 24

> One needs an escape character from an 8-bit Acsii code. [...] Following
> the escape byte would be a byte identifying the function.  Functions
> include: [...] Specify the alphabet to be used for subsequent characters
> (e.g., Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, etc.)

	Just to play devil's advocate for a minute, let's say you have a
file in greek, with the first couple of bytes being the "locking shift to
greek" function.  Guess what breaks:

	Tail -- you can't get the last 10 lines of a file if you don't read
the whole file and track the shift commands.

	Grep -- you're looking for all lines containing pi-iota-gamma;
should grep track the shift commands and surround each output line by
"locking shift to greek" and "back to English"?  If you do it that way, and
run "grep ^ < greek1 > greek2", the greek[12] files will not cmp the same
because the second will have lots of extraneous shift commands.  Do you now
need a shift-optimizing filter to put files into canonical form?

	I'm sure there are more examples, but you get the idea.
-- 
Roy Smith 
System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016