From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Tue May 17 2005 - 07:20:24 CDT
On 17/05/2005 11:50, Hans Aberg wrote:
> ...
> It can be instructive to check the history of ASCII. See for example
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII
> It says that the presently most widely used form is ANSI X3.4-1986. So
> that standard has been in active use only 19 years.
>
> So if ASCII based software now switches to use say UTF-8 instead,
> which does not seems to be so difficult to achieve, the 25 year limit
> on active use may apply to that one, too.
Thank you, Hans. But I would suggest that ASCII is already obsolete, in
that almost no one still uses it. In practice they have long been using
supersets like any of the ISO-8859 variants or UTF-8. Of course many
users in practice restrict themselves largely to the original ASCII
subset. But I consider a standard which has been supersetted in this way
as no longer in active use.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/ -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.308 / Virus Database: 266.11.11 - Release Date: 16/05/2005
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