🚀 go-pugleaf

>Another interesting bit:  Some news postings have various punctuations
>in the places of Scandinavian characters that do not exist in the
>American alphabet.  I don't remember the equivalences.  They always
>show as the puncutations, curly braces, vertical bar, etc, on my
>terminals and on the Xerox 4075 laser printer I usually use.

>I'm guessing:
>some writers are substituting US punctuations and probably are on
>machines that can't generate Scandinavian characters but others are
>apparently using machines that actually do create Scandinavian
>characters and are sending them in postings; they appear as US
>punctuations when the high bit is stripped.

No bit stripping here, the character set is a national variant of ISO
646 and is 7 bits wide. It substitutes curly braces etc. with those
national characters. You then need a terminal and printer equiped with
the right character sets to see those character right. Or you just have
to get used to see and type those braces and replace with the right
national glyphs in your mind. This is what many people here do. For
programming you need those braces from ASCII and for other text the
national characters from the 646 variant. It's too tedious to switch the
terminal character set, so you just keep it ASCII. Or, to my disgust,
keep it in 646 mode and type adiaeresis etc. instead of braces in your C
programs.

>I'm still after the ISO 16bit (I hope) _standard_.

ISO 10646 is a 32 bit character set. As part of it it has a 16-bit plane
also known as Unicode.
-- 
                  dos, windows, nt... are you a victim of the MS disease?