Re: reinventing ASCII?

"wildhalcyon" <wild.halcyon@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message 
news:0a003284-3ae4-4215-ace9-9ed26b261f51@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Hypothetically, if you could reinvent ASCII in a modern context, what
> would you remove or add to the specification?
>
> Unicode looks like its set to take ASCII's place somewhere down the
> line, so this is mostly a thought problem, but I'm curious about what
> changes others might implement. I think the first logical change would
> be implementing it as 8-bit, rather than 7-bit, to take advantage of a
> full byte. After that, maybe remove most of the non-printable
> characters. I don't know any modern programs that take advantage of
> most of them. What to fill the additional spaces with though, I don't
> know.

actually, that it only uses 7 bits is nice  for UTF-8, since UTF-8 text,
for 
the ASCII range, is still ASCII (and vice versa...).

there is also a full 8-bit alternative to ASCII, and it is EBCDIC...


I think I before also use some of the control-character space, not as 
control characters, but for embedding special commands for a "psuedo-text"

format, if I remember correctly. it was one or another of my odd-varieties

of self-compressed XML I think.

another possibility, would be a purely-textual variety, which could well 
make more sense (no need for special handling and would be directly 
human-decodable). of course, the much more popular/common option, is to
take 
XML and compress it with deflate or similar (pro: commonly agreeable, con:

does not allow optimizing the decoding process...).

or such...