Re: what does "serialization" mean?

From: Randy Howard (randyhoward_at_FOOverizonBAR.net)
Date: 06/29/04 

Date: Tue, 29 Jun 2004 01:41:48 GMT

In article <f5dda427.0406251435.4ee4babe@posting.google.com>, spinoza1111
@yahoo.com says...
> > I'm sorry, Edward... but when international standards tell me that ASCII is
> > a 7-bit code, I'm inclined to believe them especially since they've defined
> > ASCII since 1969.
>
> The 7 bit encoding was a mistake, because you don't want to use a
> prime number. If you do (as was done initially), this is guaranteed to
> waste bits in all implementations.

OMFG. I can't believe this hasn't received more of a response than it
has. If you REALLY want to know, you might start here:

http://www.bobbemer.com/brandela.htm

Quotation from the above link:
"The story of ASCII wouldn't be complete without mentioning the "escape"
sequence. According to Bemer, it's the most important piece of the ASCII
puzzle. Early in the game, ANSI recognized that 128 characters were
insufficient to accommodate a worldwide communication system. But the seven-bit
limitation of the hardware at the time forbade them to go beyond that. "

I will point out that after sitting out such discussions for 4 days (a direct
lightning strike that whacks most of the electronics in your house can do
that), as requested by Arthur, made no discernable decrease in Nilgewater, if
anything, it's actually increased a bit.

> I believe that rather than admit its mistake, the standards body
> continues to insist on the "magic number 7" while actual praxis uses
> 8.

Doubt it. I don't know for sure, but I have a sneaky suspicion that the
ASCII committee hasn't met to discuss character encoding formats for many,
many years. They're not about to change ASCII now, especially when UTF-8,
UTF-16, ISO 10646, etc. are far and away more important now.

> My Structuralist analysis concludes that any word is less a positive
> signifier than a division between entities of interest, and here, the
> boundary is at the 8 bit code. There are international characters in
> the range 0..255 but most occur past 255.

And, are by definition, not ASCII, and quite the exact same numeric value
(>127) is used to represent different encoding format depending on
locale. Another example: early PC systems used widely varying encodings
for the extra "extended" characters above 127 for such things as graphics
characters (pre-bitmapped display days). The Heathkit H-89/Z89 systems
used them for a host of special characters which could be displayed on their
monochrome monitors (character based) to do things like draw spaceships for
Space Invaders or LEM games. If ASCII has used all 0-255 for special
characters (it would have been nowhere near enough for all of them worldwide
anyway), such games would have really sucked. :-)

Prime numbers... furrfu. 

-- 
Randy Howard    (2reply remove FOOBAR)
"The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its
continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the
computer hardware industry..."   - Henry Petroski