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From: newsuser@LTH.Se (Lund Institute of Technology news server)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc,comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d,comp.emacs
Subject: US PC programmers still live in a 7-bit world!
Message-ID: <1988Jun22.223158.1366@LTH.Se>
Date: 22 Jun 88 21:31:58 GMT
Reply-To: torsten@DNA.LTH.Se (Torsten Olsson)
Organization: Computer Science, Lund Institute of Technology, Sweden
Lines: 52

US PC programmers still live in a 7-bit world!

But we don't!
_____________


Yes, there  i s  intelligent life outside the USA. We even live
in an 8-bit world, which must come as a shocking piece of news
to some of you.

All right, you get a lot of credit for producing lovely programs
like uEmacs, Picnix, Tcless, and the like. They are lovely, yes, but
just to a certain extent, because they are completely useless
in Europe!

Why? Well, we are sure the intelligent reader already grasps the
reason. Take a look at the IBM PC character code set  a b o v e
ASCII 127. Our alphabet is there, too, and you just can't imagine
what funny results your tools yield when encountering them.

For instance, these are letters:

        Lower case      Upper case  |   Lower case      Upper case
        129             154         |   145             146
        130              -          |   147              -
        131              -          |   148             153
        132             142         |   149              -
        133              -          |   150              -
        134             143         |   151              -
        135             128         |   152              -
        136              -          |   160              -
        137              -          |   161              -
        138              -          |   162              -
        139              -          |   163              -
        140              -          |   164             165
        141              -          |

So, if your pet program is to become our pet, too, you have
to rethink concerning using the 8th bit as a flag, you have
to rewrite toupper, tolower, word scan, delete word, word
counters and the like.

Then you, as well, will discover the joys in the real, 8-bit
world!

Have fun.

-- 
Torsten Olsson, Dept of Comp Sc, Lund University, Box 118, S221 00 Lund, Sweden
Phone: +46-46104930 (work), +46-46126768 (home)    Bitnet: lthlib@seldc52
Internet: torsten@dna.lth.se   or   torsten%dna.lth.se@uunet.uu.net
UUCP: {uunet,mcvax}!enea!dna.lth.se!torsten