7-bit encodings (was: Re: The joy of FORTRAN-like languages)

On 2024-09-28, Lars Poulsen wrote:

On 28/09/2024 14:20, John Levine wrote:

C was in the sweet spot of being not all that great, but better than any of the
plausible alternatives at the time.

>
I was late to discovering C. In the 1970's I lived in Denmark, and our
terminals, printers, keyboards etc were using a national version of
the ISO standard interchange code that Americans kn ow as ASCII.
Since Danish have three unique (well sort-of shared with Swedish and
Norvegian) vowels at the end of the alphabet (æ ø å / Æ Ø Å), these
were allocated at the end of the alphabet - after z / Z. When you look
at the ASCII character table, you will see that each of these
conflicts with significant symbols of the C language ({ \ } / [ |
]). This created a strong disincentive to experiment with a "fringe"
programming language.

ISO-646?

In my journey with computers, I think I've only used the 8-bit encodings
that were supersets of ASCII, although I did have the opportunity to see
ISO-646-FI in action in a terminal once. It was interesting, trying to
get some software to produce a more readable/usable interface or convert
the content (If I understood correctly, irssi seemed to have lost some
of the handling for ISO-646 by then? I may have not checked thoroughly,
though.).

It really was not until I got to California that it became easy to
write C. And by then, I was working on VMS and Unix (V7 on a pdp11/70,
soon replaced by 4.2BSD on a VAX-11/750).
>
Back when ACC stood for Associated Computer Consultants, I became
lars@acc - which then became lars@acc.arpa, even though we landed on
the MILNET side of the divide.
>

--
Nuno Silva