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

On 09.05.2025 02:19, Keith Thompson wrote:

BGB <cr88192@gmail.com> writes:

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The Latin-1 8-bit character set is largely obsolete.  Whatever point
you're making, I suspect you could make it much more clearly without
any reference to Latin-1 or Windows-1252.

Indeed.

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It is 8-bit and byte-based, and informally I think, most
extended-ASCII codepages were collectively known as ASCII even if only
the low 7-bit range is ASCII proper (and I think more for sake of
contrast with "Not Unicode", eg, UTF-8 / UTF-16 / UCS-2 / ...).

 
No, 8-bit character sets are not ASCII.  Calling them "extended ASCII"
is reasonable.

Back then when the ASCII character set got extended it may have been
sensible (for a short period of time!) to use an informal term like
"extended ASCII" but with the many different extensions it's IMO not
reasonable any more to do so, since it inflicts more confusion than
make intentions clear.

Also "extended ASCII" sounds (in my ears) like a determined character
set (as opposed to "_an_ ASCII extension"). Unicode is [roughly] also
an ASCII extension.

Janis