Re: reinventing ASCII?

ram@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Stefan Ram) writes:

"Charlie Gordon" <news@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
I'd make '0' - '9' and 'A' - 'Z' contiguous ;)
Do you mean '9' + 1 == 'A' ?

Probably. And while it would make hexadecimal conversion a bit
simpler, I don't find it really important.

Some aspects of the original design where:

- Digits and symbols they are usually paired with
on a keyboard should differ only by one
bit in order to simplify keyboard design
(i.e., »1!«, »3#«, »4$«, and so on).

This is certainly not relevant anymore. Besides, the placement of the
symbols on the shifted numeric keys is not the same in all countries.
For example, the standard Danish keyboard layout has '(' and ')' over
8 and 9 insted of over 9 and 0. Some older typewriters don't even
have separate 0 and 1 keys, requiring you to use O and l instead.

- All (uppercase) letters should reside within
a single 5-bit block.

Less relevant now than then, but not completely irrelevant.

- The lowest four bits of a digit should represent
its value.

This is on par with having A-Z directly after 0-9: It makes text to
number conversion slightly easier, but not by much. I write c-'0'
rather than c&0xf to find the value of a digit, as I find the
intention much clearer. And it doesn't take any longer to do on
modern hardware.

- Due to technical reasons, »0000000« and »1111111«
had to be control codes (NUL and DEL, respectively).
Therefore, the outer regions of the code were used
for control codes, while printable characters were
placed in the middle.

This is almost irrelevant now, except I shouldn't wonder if some
hardware would break if it was changed.

Torben
.

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