At 02:37 PM 5/26/1999 -0500, Coniam, William (MSgt) wrote:
>Anyone know the relevant ANSI standard that defined
>the escape sequences?  The MS-DOS manual doesn't say.

    Hmmm.  Since you mention MS-DOG you may be interested in IBM code
pages, probably 802, rather than ANSI standards, but the best references
are the ISO standards:

    ISO 646:1991 (7-bit ASCII) actually 7-bit ASCII is the US localization
of ISO-646.  Now effectively obsolete.

    ISO 2022  This is the standard which provided for switching two of four
seven bit code pages into an 8-bit code set.  The ISO code pages were
defined by:

    ISO/IEC 8859/1 through 8859/10  These are the standard 8-bit code sets.
 Latin-1 is 8859/1, etc.  (But 8859/5 is not Latin-5 so be careful.)
Right now the situation is slightly chaotic due to the Euro currency
symbol, which is in the newest version of Latin-1.  It replaces the
"international currency symbol," which no one ever used anyway.  Other than
that ASCII is now 8-bits and identical to Latin-1.

    (I probably should recommend an extension to Ada 95, to allow
"Euro_Sign renames Currency_Sign;" to be added to the package
Ada.Characters.Latin1.)

    ISO/IEC 6429:1992  Which names and assigns the control characters to
code maps.  (There is also another such standard for biblographic use which
has many differences, but fortunately it was never widely used.)

    ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993 Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set (UCS).
This is the way forward.  You may have heard of Unicode a 16-bit character
set, which modulo occiasional version skew is the Basic Multilingual Plane
of 10646.
But 10646 contains much much more.  It basically defines a 32-bit!
character set, and ways to subset and encode it.  Some of these encodings
look like the lower page of Latin-1 with various encodings for the upper
page, so they don't take up much more space than Latin-1 for things that
can be written in Latin-1.


                                        Robert I. Eachus

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