Newsgroups: bit.listserv.xmailer
Date:         Mon, 6 Apr 1992 16:49:21 +0200
From:         Eric Thomas <ERIC@SEARN.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: Long lines, MIME, EBCDIC, etc : random thoughts.
              6 Apr 1992 14:16:46 +0200 from The Crosswell Mailer List
              <XMAILER@FINHUTC>

On Mon,  6 Apr 1992  14:16:46 +0200  "Alain FONTAINE (Postmaster  - UCL)"
<fontaine@SRI.UCL.AC.BE> said:

>- One  writer says,  in a  way that  sounds as  a critic,  that Internet
>  standards are based  on ASCII. Well, in my opinion,  it is normal that
>  open 'standards'  (quotes to avoid  the usual 'Internet  standards are
>  not true standards' flame) are based  on other open standards, and not
>  on some corporate 'standard'.

I thought ISO had a standard for EBCDIC as well. Anyway, EBCDIC is a fact
of life and  not taking its existence into account  is either childish or
unproductive,  depending on  the context.  If  you write  a standard  and
expect everyone in the world to comply to it, but define it in terms that
make it work only  with ASCII, it will be difficult  to complain that IBM
sites are not respecting the standard. It's like complaining to owners of
diesel cars  that they  are not  using the new  standardized type  of gas
defined by some new norm.

>  Internet standard  use the term  'ASCII' in its  restricted acception,
>  anyone using national variants of ISO646  in an Internet context is an
>  outlaw.

But it is again a fact of life  that many people do so. One can decide to
ignore the fact that there are people west  of LA and east of NYC, but it
does not help much in an international context. The facts are that double
quote and exclamation  point are special characters  which need encoding.
Nobody is happy about  that, but it's the way things  are. You can't just
wish the problem away by saying  "Hey, you're an outlaw, you're not using
the  US codepage!"  (sorry, I  meant international;  it's the  US one  of
course, but I believe it is called "international ASCII").

>- The  impossibility the  define a  single, 'correct'  translation table
>  between ASCII  and EBCDIC, because  there is nothing like  'EBCDIC' in
>  the  first place,  has plagued  e-mail  users on  EBCDIC machines  and
>  networks for years.

You are making  the same mistake again. In practice,  people use variants
of both ASCII and EBCDIC, and  thus there CANNOT be a correct translation
table, even with all the standards in the planet, until everyone uses the
same variant.

As you  know there have  been long debates  within IBM user  groups about
EBCDIC codepages  and so  on. The  reason it  took so  long and  not much
happened is that there is no easy solution. You can take a piece of paper
and write  "network EBCDIC" on  it and define a  code page, and  you will
still not have done much about the 100-or-so different versions of EBCDIC
in daily use  all over the planet. For instance,  programs (I mean source
code) are not 'text' objects unless the language does not use any special
character. To properly retrieve  a piece of C, I need  to use binary mode
if I  have a national translation  table in effect. Yet  programs contain
messages, possibly in a language that uses outlawed versions of ASCII. We
may speak the same language and have systems with the same character set,
but different  code pages.  I want  the braces  to come  out as  what the
compiler  expects, and  the  national letters  to come  out  as what  the
terminal  expects.  No  translation  will achieve  that  in  the  current
context. The only solution that has a small chance to work is to define a
new character set with all the  common symbols, a la Latin-1, and migrate
everyone to it. If there was a  simple solution, you can be sure we would
have implemented it on our own as a 'de facto' standard!

  Eric
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU