* Alf P. Steinbach:
* osmium:
James Kanze wrote:
On May 29, 3:08 pm, Gerhard Fiedler <geli...@gmail.com> wrote:
James Kanze wrote:
(Given that ASCII is for all intents and purposes dead, it's
highly unlikely that they really want ASCII.)
I'm not sure, but I think in the USA there is quite a number
of programmers who don't think beyond ASCII when thinking of
text manipulation.
In just about every country, there are quite a number of
programmers who don't think:-). The fact remains that the
default encoding used by the system, even when configured for
the US, is not ASCII. Even if you're not "thinking" beyond
ASCII, your program must be capable of reading non-ASCII
characters (if only to recognize them and signal the error).
Is it your point that an ASCII compliant environment would have to
signal an error if the topmost bit in a byte was something other than 0?
I think James is perhaps referring to routines like isdigit family.
Some of them take int argument and have UB if the argument value is
outside 0...(unsigned char)(-1).
So with most implementations you get UB if you simply pass a char
directly as argument and that char is beyond ASCII range, because then
it will be negative.
Or do you have something else in mind? I don't have the *actual*
ASCII standard available but I would be surprised if that was
expressed as a *requirement*.
See above.
After all, the people that wrote the standard were well aware that
there was no such thing as a seven-bit machine.
On the contrary, the seven bit nature of ASCII was to facilitate
communication over e.g. serial links with software parity check, where
each byte was effectively seven bits (since one bit was used for parity).
Forgot to add, one of the early PDPs had, as I recall, configurable byte size... :-)
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