Re: reinventing ASCII?

On 3 Mar, 13:56, wildhalcyon <wild.halc...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> 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.

In the context of this newsgroup - i.e. language design - my belief is
that a language would benefit from independence from the character
representation. In other words I'd say ASCII is not pragmatically
better or worse than any other representation EXCEPT I would say that
the non-printable characters are a pain.

Which non-printable characters are still needed? How about

   0  NUL
   4  EOT (end of transmission)
   9  TAB (or field separator)
   10 LF (or end of line)

Any more? Of course, only one or two control chars are really needed,
perhaps one to say that the next byte is to be interpreted as a non-
printable (perhaps a control code) and one to introduce a composite
character.

In short, to reply to your post, the thing I'd like change most in
ASCII is to get rid of most of the non-printables. Pity we can't get
rid of the lot of 'em!

--
James