ASCII as a subset of Unicode (was: Re: Oxford proposes a leaner alphabet)

From: Doug Ewell (doug@ewellic.org)
Date: Sat Apr 11 2009 - 12:50:13 CDT

  • Next message: Hans Aberg: "Re: ASCII as a subset of Unicode (was: Re: Oxford proposes a leaner alphabet)"

    Marion Gunn <mgunn at egt dot ie> wrote:

    > Umm - surely, Doug, saying "ASCII characters are [just] part of
    > Unicode" is just like saying "the US is [just] part of the Western
    > World"! Vill ni skicka ett bud till honom, Hans? ;-)

    I don't understand this. The set of ASCII characters is a proper and
    intact subset of the set of Unicode characters. Whether they are "more
    important" than other Unicode characters, or whatever Marion was trying
    to get at with her remark about the U.S. and her winky comment in
    Swedish about sending a courier to me, was not my point.

    The confusion over terminology regarding ASCII and Unicode is still
    widespread. Perhaps one of the most bizarre examples I've seen was in
    the documentation for Intersystems Caché, a database, which said "Valid
    characters may be 8-bit ASCII, or ISO Latin-1 Unicode."

    In 2009, we ought to regard ASCII as "ISO 10646, constrained to the
    Basic Latin range, represented in UTF-8, with control characters
    interpreted as per ISO 6429."

    --
    Doug Ewell  *  Thornton, Colorado, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
    http://www.ewellic.org
    http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
    http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages  ˆ
    


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