Re: ASCII fades

RaD Man [ACiD Founder] (rad...@nospam.acid.org) wrote:
: Wrong wrong wrong wrong WRONG.  

Lest we get any more half truths..

: There is ASCII and there is Extended ASCII, or otherwise known as MS-DOS
: Extended ASCII or "high ASCII".  This is just an extension to the basic ASCII
: character set.  ASCII art which consists only of the lower character set is

Indeed, but beware of playing tricks with adjectives. Extended ASCII is not
really ASCII, just as, say, a broken window is not really a window, but just
pieces of glass. (a contrived example, I know, but you get the point)

: "oldschool".  Extended ASCII has NOTHING to do with the American National
: Standards Institute, or ANSI.SYS, or "ANSI Color", or VT-100!

Well, it might have something to do with ANSI (the institute). The extended
character set used in Windows and most other systems is called ISO-8559-1 or
ISO Latin 1, where ISO stands for International Standards Organizations,
8559 is the standard, and 1 is the particular set of characters (there are
other variations such as ISO-8859-2)

I don't know if there is an equivalent ANSI standard, but there might well
be, in which case calling them ANSI characters would be, if not too logical,
then at least justifiable.

: So remember kids, it's called Extended ASCII!  If it's not colored, it's NOT
: ANSI!

And remember: *ANSI does not mean color!* People often use the name as an
abbreviation for the ANSI standard display control codes (no, I haven't the
faintest idea what the standard number might be) but IMHO this is one of
those silly habits like calling a microwave oven a micro.

And yes, I think there is an equivalent ISO standard.

To get the point straight, here's a list of character sets:

Name:                    Bits: Notes:
ASCII                    7     American Standard Code for Information
                               Interchange
ISO-8859-1 / ISO Latin 1 8     (first 128 characters same as in ASCII)
MS-DOS extended ASCII    8     (first 128 characters same as in ASCII)
Unicode                  16    (first 256 characters same as in ISO-8859-1)

Now how many bits did EBCDIC have, I wonder..

--  __,,,------._
 ,-/|            `-.  Ilmari Karonen (ilt...@sci.fi) ^ All opinions expressed
/,  '\,     `.  ,|"-;;.__ http://www.sci.fi/~iltzu/ | in this message are my
/ ' 4(_,-_,-"_,/.'   `'--' ,------------------------' own. If you want me to
"`-(_,-"" `-' (,' itz      | make some for you too, you should pay for them!

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