The following sentence appears near the beginning of section 4:
In retrospect, one of the
advantages of ASCII [X3.4-1978] when it was chosen was that the code
space was full when the Standard was first published. There was no
practical way to add characters or change code point assignments
without being obviously incompatible.
I don't think I've seen this observation made in writing before, and it is
interesting. However, I see a couple of problems. Particularly, the fact
that there was no way to change code point assignments without being
obviously incompatible did not in fact prevent such changes. While that
change is little more than a footnote today (few people have documents
lying around whose meaning depends on the left-arrow and up-arrow and are
destroyed by using underscore and caret instead), a similar change today to
either ASCII or Unicode could be disastrous, depending on the code points
changed.
Secondly, the reference tag [X3.4-1978] is wrong, as the target of the
reference is actually X3.4-1968 (and in fact the references section uses
the wrong tag, but the correct citation).
-- Jeff
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