Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site phri.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxr!mhuxn!ihnp4!pesnta!phri!roy 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 References: <723@inset.UUCP> <960@erix.UUCP> <1569@hammer.UUCP> <6066@utzoo.UUCP> <224@l5.uucp> <988@erix.UUCP> <762@mmintl.UUCP> 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 SmithSystem Administrator, Public Health Research Institute 455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016