About the name of ASCII: [...] Their recommendation was to use
the registration number of the ISO 2375 registry administered by ECMA.
A character set could then be referenced as "ISO IR xxx" meaning ISO
International Registration number xxx.
ASCII (the 7-bit critter we know so well) has registration number 6.
My naming takes the effort to make the name a token, so I call
it "ISO-IR-6".
It doesn't really matter what token we use as long as we agree what it
means. But two warnings about "ISO-IR-6":
First, IA5, what X.400 uses, is based on ISO-IR-2.
Second: As I understand it, each registration numbers refers to only a
part of a typical character set. In particular, registration numbers
refer to coded character sets of size 94 or 96 or, for multibyte
character sets, 94^n or 96^n. Typical character sets are larger, like
94+96 (for 8-bit) or 94+94^2+96.
For example, ISO 8859/1 (Latin-1) has characters from registrations 6
and 100 -- the 6 refers to ASCII and the 100 to the right hand part of
8859/1. There are additional registration numbers for the control
characters. Calling 8859/1 "ISO-IR-100" would be inexact, at best.
Also I believe a commonly used character set in Japan uses ISO 2022
with characters from 14 in G0, 81 in G1 and 13 in G2. What would you
use for this?
Even ASCII is really composed of 6 with control characters (probably
registration #1).
To name the existing character set used by 822 systems, I prefer
something simple like "ASCII" or "US-ASCII". The differences between
versions and vintages are fairly minor and are probably not adhered to
by real systems anyway. Does everybody reading this mail see
"$(_at_)[]\^`{}|~" as dollar sign, at sign, square brackets, back slash,
caret, back quote, curly brackets, vertical bar and tilde (hope I've
got the names right!)? For the future we should nail down the
character set as exactly as possible, including whether regionally
varying renditions are allowed.
Pete