Re: Rationale for aligning data on even bytes in a Unix shell file?

BGB <cr88192@gmail.com> writes:

On 5/8/2025 6:13 AM, Janis Papanagnou wrote:

On 08.05.2025 05:30, BGB wrote:

[...]
>
Though, even for the Latin alphabet, once one goes much outside of ASCII
and Latin-1, it gets messy.

I noticed that in several places you were referring to
Latin-1. Since
decades that has been replaced by the Latin-9 (ISO 8859-15) character
set[*] for practical reasons ('€' sign, for example).
Why is your focus still on the old Latin-1 (ISO 8859-1) character
set?
Janis, just curious
[*] Unless Unicode and its encodings are used.
 

>
U+00A0..U+00FF are designated as Latin-1 in Unicode.

I don't think that's accurate.  Do you have a reference for that?
It's true that those characters have the same names in Unicode
as in Latin-1.  Though the Wikipedia article says that the ranges
0x00..0x1F and 0x7F..0x9F are *undefined*.  (That doesn't match my
recollection; I thought they were defined as control characters.)

In any case, Latin-1 and Latin-9 treat those ranges in the same way.
Both can be seen as encodings for small subsets of Unicode.

[...]

CP-1252, is the dominant remaining ASCII character set in use, is
based on Latin-1, with a few characters from Latin-15 shoved into the
places where control codes previously went.

CP-1252 is not an ASCII character set.  ASCII is a 7-bit character set.
CP-1252 is an 8-bit character set as are the Latin-* sets.  Most 8-bit
sets are *based on* ASCII.

--
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith) Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com
void Void(void) { Void(); } /* The recursive call of the void */