Text 5521, 60 rader
Skriven 2012-06-25 17:51:33 av Michiel van der Vlist (2:280/5555)
     Kommentar till en text av Dale Shipp (1:261/1466.0)
Ärende: a neat little test o
============================
Hello Dale,

On Sunday June 24 2012 23:36, you wrote to me:

 MVDV>> Character sets that consist of the ASCII set extended with 127 or
 MVDV>> 91 characters with the highest bit set have been in use for a long
 MVDV>> time, but it is technically incorrect to call them "high ASCII" or
 MVDV>> "extended ASCII".

 DS> Of course it is not a standard, but the term has been in accepted use
 DS> by the public for perhaps three decades.

We are the FTSC, not Wikipedia where thing become correct just because enough
people say so.

 DS> And it has seen use in various fidonet documents since then as well,
 DS> including some of the FTSC documents.

Has it? You mentione FSC-0054 in another message, but I did not find "extended
ASCII" in there. I did find the term "extended character set" and moder
specific: "IBM extended character set" and "Latin-1 extended charcater set.

Those are correct as they are indeed extensions of the ASCII character set.
"Extended ASCII" is incorrect as that suggests that the definition of the ASCII
set itself has been extended.

 MVDV>> If we restrict it to systems in use for reading and writing
 MVDV>> Fidonet messages, and if what you have in mind is code page
 MVDV>> 437, then you are most likely in error. The majority of
 MVDV>> systems default to CP866 or KOI8-R. Third and fourth place
 MVDV>> may be CP850 and LATIN-1.

 DS> I will agree that there are probably more fidonet systems in Eastern
 DS> Europe and that they would most likely use one of the two cryillic
 DS> code pages you mentioned as first.  The other two are probably the
 DS> majority in Western Europe.

Sure.

 DS> That said, I believe that CP437, aka "extended ASCII", is what is the
 DS> default installed on most of the PC Clones produced in the US, if not
 DS> elsewhere.

The world is bigger than the US.

 DS>   Someone else here said that it is the code page used during boot up,
 DS> and that other code pages need to be loaded after boot.

My Win98 system boots up in CP850 and if I want CP437, I have to explicitly
change the boot configuration. It will NOT load another code page after
booting.

My XP system also defaults to CP850, but that can easily be changed on the fly
with the CHCP command. There is even a Code page for UTF-8: 65001


Cheers, Michiel

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