Exended ASCII and code pages [was Re: for / while else doesn't make sense]

[Jussi Piitulainen]

Erik writes:

> On 25/05/16 11:19, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>> On Wednesday 25 May 2016 19:10, Christopher Reimer wrote:
>>
>>> Back in the early 1980's, I grew up on 8-bit processors and latin-1
>>> was all we had for ASCII.
>>
>> It really, truly wasn't. But you can be forgiven for not knowing
>> that, since until the rise of the public Internet most people weren't
>> exposed to more than one code page or encoding, and it was incredibly
>> common for people to call *any* encoding "ASCII".
>
> Indeed - at that time, I was working with COBOL on an IBM S/370. On
> that system, we used EBCDIC ASCII. That was the wierdest ASCII of all
> <ducks> ;)

UTF-8 ASCII is nice.

UTF-16 ASCII is weird. Wierd. Probably all right in an environment that
is otherwise set to use UTF-16.

Nothing is as weird as a mix of different encodings of a foreign script
in the same "plain text" file, said to be "Unicode". <shudder/>