Xref: utzoo comp.sys.ibm.pc:16652 comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d:458 comp.emacs:3677 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!enea!Urd!newsuser 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