FYI, I posted Kate McMillan's quotes from your comments to OMC (I think) to the J11 (C language) dist list. Here's one comment: Date: Fri, 18 Nov 94 12:43:00 MST From: "Nelson H. F. Beebe" To: uunet!aussie.COM!rex (Rex Jaeschke) Cc: uunet!math.utah.edu!beebe X-Us-Mail: "Center for Scientific Computing, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112" X-Telephone: +1 801 581 5254 X-Fax: +1 801 581 4148 Subject: Re: Do you want 7-bit ASCII withdrawn as a standard? Message-Id: >> Do you want 7-bit ASCII withdrawn as a standard? Absolutely NOT. We already have seen the morass people are getting into with scores of code pages appended to ISO 8859-1, plus the incompatible Macintosh and various IBM PC extensions. The ISO10646/Unicode effort, once widely adopted, will move us to a uniform, and universal, character set with (initially at least) 16-bit characters. This move is going to be enormously painful, and will take much longer than anyone expects. Please, let us NOT muddy the waters further by fiddling with the 7-bit/8-bit character set standards. They need to be FROZEN solid in perpetuity until we all view them as historical artifacts, like 6-bit character sets now are. ======================================================================== Nelson H. F. Beebe Tel: +1 801 581 5254 Center for Scientific Computing FAX: +1 801 581 4148 Department of Mathematics, 105 JWB Internet: beebe@math.utah.edu University of Utah Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA ======================================================================== Rex ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- +1 703 860-0091 | Rex Jaeschke | C and C++ Seminars rex@aussie.com | 2051 Swans Neck Way | and Consulting | Reston, Virginia 22091, USA | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Chair of the ANSI C committee X3J11 (which now incorporates X3J11.1) and member of the US delegation to the ISO C committee SC22/WG14. C/C++ editor for DEC PROFESSIONAL magazine. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------