Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:
(and that despite the fact that it's perfectly well possible to write -any language out there- in the first 7 bits of ascii)
Yes, any language including FORTRAN.
And it's *equally* possible to write "any language out there" using a 7-bit encoding of the Cyrillic character set.
Yes, any language including FORTRAN, because KOI-7, a 7-bit encoding of the Cyrillic character set, includes all the uppercase Latin characters.
Oh, that would suck because Cyrillic isn't very similar to your native character set? Welcome to the way the vast majority of the world feels.
See how the vast majority of the world feels. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_646 Since the portion of ISO/IEC 646 shared by all countries (the "invariant set") specified only those letters used in the ISO basic Latin alphabet, Masataka Ohta