Re: Brian Kernighan, maybe I'm not worthy, maybe I'm scum

Randy Howard said:

On Mon, 31 Dec 2007 03:09:36 -0600, Richard Heathfield wrote
(in article <dfydndBlZL1oLeXanZ2dnUVZ8tninZ2d@xxxxxx>):

Malcolm McLean said:

<snip>

The &name; format is dependent on ASCII

No, it isn't. The same syntax can be used in any character set that
supports the lower case letters, the ampersand, and the semicolon. And
the same *idea* could be used even if those specific characters were not
available. EBCDIC, which obviously does support the ampersand and
semicolon, could support that format easily.

Some extension of trigraphs springs to mind :)

Well, trigraphs are a bit of a wart, but yes, they have their uses, and
yes, they illustrate that an encoding scheme for otherwise unencoded
characters does not depend on the specific base encoding scheme. That is,
trigraphs work just fine in ASCII and in EBCDIC. And so could a scheme
that uses &code; syntax.

--
Richard Heathfield <http://www.cpax.org.uk>
Email: -http://www. +rjh@
Google users: <http://www.cpax.org.uk/prg/writings/googly.php>
"Usenet is a strange place" - dmr 29 July 1999
.

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