31 Jan
2012
31 Jan
'12
8:45 a.m.
On Jan 31, 2012, at 11:21 AM, Sean Conner wrote:
A friend recently raised an issue with some code I wrote (a hex dump
routine) saying it depended upon ASCII and thus, would break on non-ASCII
based systems (and proposed a solution, but that's beside the issue here).
I wrote back, saying the code in question was non-portable to begin with
(since it depended upon read() and write()---it was targetted at Posix based
systems) and besides, I've never encountered a non-ASCII system in the
nearly 30 years I've been using computers.
So now I'm wondering---besides Baudot, 6-bit BCD and EBCDIC, is there any
other encoding scheme used? And of Baudot, 6-bit BCD and EBCDIC, are there
any systems using those encoding schemes *AND* have a C compiler available?
I assume you're counting Unicode as a subset of ASCII (which isn't exactly true,
though for practical purposes when you're talking about UTF-8, it's mostly
interoperable). If you were in a pure 16-bit Unicode system, that's a consideration.
No C compiler I can think of that supports 16-bit Unicode, but Java certainly did.
- Dave