FreeTDS Development Group

["Lowden, James K" <LowdenJK AT bernstein.com>]

> From: Steve Langasek [mailto:vorlon AT netexpress.net]
> Sent: September 3, 2002 10:59 AM
>
> Further assertion: all national language character sets in current use
> on either Unix or Windows platforms are codepoint compatible 
> with ASCII. 
> With the exception of widechar encodings (UCS-2 and UCS-4), 
> they are also byte-compatible with ASCII.

Support for your assertion.

http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/Tools/I18N/LJ-I18N.html:

...the major standards for programming languages (e.g., ISO C), operating
systems (POSIX), user interfaces (the X Window system), and inter-system
communication (RFC 1123, MIME, and ISO 2022) all specify portable character
sets which are subsets of ASCII. Protocol keywords are defined to be strings
from the portable character set, and where an default initial encoding is
specified, it is US ASCII (or its superset, ISO-8859-1). (Note that in most
cases it is a character set that is specified; for example, in C and X
Windows, IBM mainframes must support a portable character set which is a
subset of ASCII, but those characters will be encoded in EBCDIC.) 

The only exception is ISO 2022 which specifies neither a portable character
set nor ASCII as default, and even there the influence of ASCII is extremely
strong: the 256 possible bytes are divided into "left" (eighth bit zero) and
"right" (eighth bit one) halves of 128 code points each, and within each
half the first 32 code points (0x00--0x1F) are reserved for control
characters, while the remaining 96 may be printable characters. Further,
positions 0x20 and 0x7F have reserved interpretations as the SPC and DEL
characters respectively and may not be used for graphic characters, while
0xA0 and 0xFF are often left unused. 

--jkl


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