[rescue] Corrupted list messages

[Clem Cole]

On Fri, Oct 1, 2021 at 10:10 AM Mouse <mouse at rodents-montreal.org> wrote:

>
>
> > Note the "US" in "US-ASCII".  It omits characters used elsewhere in
> > the Anglosphere.
>
> Certainly.  It also omits some characters used in the USA in the days
> before everything got smushed into compatability with computers.
>
> > So this is just good old American exceptionalism.
>
> It is.  There are a lot of legacy issues deriving from the USA being
> where much of computing got its start.
>
It is less actually US centric as much as the EU folks agreed to it
actually when it all went down in the 1960s.   EMCA-6 [ISO/IEC 646] agreed
to this mapping why?  Because just breaking 6 bits to 7 bits was a huge
thing when it was all defined [EMCA-6 is in 1965]  and it was just not
economical otherwise: (cut/pasted from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_646#ECMA-6)

*Characters in the ISO/IEC 646 Basic Character Set are invariant
characters. Since that portion of ISO/IEC 646, that is the invariant
character set shared by all countries, specified only those letters used in
the ISO basic Latin alphabet
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_basic_Latin_alphabet>, countries using
additional letters needed to create national variants of ISO 646 to be able
to use their native scripts. Since transmission and storage of 8-bit codes
was not standard at the time, the national characters had to be made to fit
within the constraints of 7 bits, meaning that some characters that appear
in ASCII <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII> do not appear in other
national variants of ISO 646.*

@Peter - Not trying to start a fight.  I agree that you are correct, that
what would eventually be the USA's ANSI team, defined the original ASCII
character set.  But I do ask you to look at the name --> *American Standard
Code for Information Interchange and what they were doing at the time*.
The problem was an issue *the US and in particular, the US Gov*, had in
those days.  Different code sets from different >>US<< manufacturers.
Other languages or countries was not even an issue.   That team set out to
solve a local problem to the US.  The came up with a nice solution.   EMCA
actually like the solution and picked it up, also with some small changes.
So, I ask you to be careful about fling too many arrows.

As Mouse pointed out, the Internet and its DNS were created to solve a
problem that the US Gov (military) had.   The solution was useful to many
outside of the DoD.  So people outside of the DoD (like me) picked it up.
Many people wanted to join in [Metcalfe's law] and eventually, people
outside the US wanted in also.   So the original constraints had to be
taken in.  A lot of the problems we have were just not considered, because
they were not problems or even considered as being a problem at the time
[and I was there on some of that -- and yes we thought 32 bits of address
was infinite for the >>experiment<< that was being run].

Just remember ISO and CITTT created a set of protocols after the DoD as
well as naming schemes for networking.   But again thanks to Metcalfe's
law, they all ultimately failed.   In many ways they were superior to what
DoD had done for the US, but in the end, economics wins.

ASCII taking off is similar since its development and success also obey
what I call 'Cole Law'  *Simple Economics always beats Sophisticated
Design * I suspect that the reason why ECMA followed the US lead was it was
far more economically at the time to use the scheme the US had come up.
 I was not there so I do not know that they had an alternative, but I do
believe that any alternative would have been expensive.   An even 'better'
scheme that could support non-US centric languages might have made more
sense, it was not financially possible.

When 8-bits became standard, we started to see 8-bit solutions come into
play.  And what happened?  We ignored Asia and even some other
non-Roman-based languages, which we could not support until 16-bits became
economical.

While I fully agree many of my fellow Americans don't see the rest of the
world and we stay with many silly concepts (like Imperial units for
instance), but before you toss too many stones remember, a lot of what we
have in the world today is because the British Empire created it and
its not interesting (*i.e.* economical) to change from it.  When those
'standards' were created there was no interest in doing things anyway but
the British way.  This is human nature.   But as a result, the 'Lingua
Franca of the world is not French ( as much as it might tick off French
speakers).   FWIW: from my work with colleagues in Europe or Asia, they
usually have learned British English in school, but have learned American
from TV (and from International travel and work).  One of my German
colleague's comment to me one was that not only was he taught British as a
child in Germany, but he was also taught British idioms too.   He told me
that those idioms were useless when came to the USA for grad school and
started to travel anywhere, but the UK.  The US idiom (probably because of
television and movies) was way more useful to him.


a'
a'