Re: New Non-WG Mailing List: IETF-822

["John R. Levine" <[e-mail]>]

Do we have to rehash all of this stuff AGAIN?

R's,
John

> Huh?   ISO/IEC 646 IRV (another candidate for a FoPSCII
> precursor) replaces the ASCII $, not #, with that universal
> currency symbol.  As for that vertical bar, sufficiently elderly
> practitioners of the art of Character Confusion and Coding (CCS)
> will recall that the ancient Earthling-Based Convention for
> Difficult Information Coding included two peculiar characters: a
> mathematical "not" sign that closely resembled Unicode's "⌐"
> (U+2310) and that broken vertical bar.  Those characters spawned
> multiple wars over how they should be mapped into "ASCII" and
> "ISO/IEC 646" with one group arguing for caret and (solid)
> vertical bar, another for tilde and exclamation mark, and a
> third for exclamation mark and [solid] vertical bar.  After much
> bloodshed, 16 and 32 bit character sets were invented so that
> almost everyone could contemplate their cakes while eating them
> and continued dissenters were tortured until they repented.
>
> Those battles were repeated in the development of FoPSCII when
> it was noticed that the 5th character of the Klingon alphabet
> was confusable with both the not-sign, Greek upper case Gamma,
> and  Latin "r".  In addition, the Klingon numeral 8 was easily
> confused with Cyrillic "Ж".  This created a variant problem
> that the Intergalactic Consortium for Arbitrary Names and
> Numbers could not dismiss because of some of the advocates had a
> more effective means of persuasion than merely hiring lawyers.
>
> :-(
>