🚀 go-pugleaf

> > One needs an escape character from an 8-bit Acsii code. [...] Following
> > the escape byte would be a byte identifying the function.  Functions
> > include: [...] Specify the alphabet to be used for subsequent characters
> > (e.g., Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, etc.)

Ascii is really a 7-bit code. Thus if the 8th bit is set then this byte and
perhaps the next can be considered escaped info. I don't believe that locking
shifts are a good idea, though, since it makes it hard to take an arbitrary
lump of text and tell what it means. Since it's been established that there is
no way of implementing a general foreign-language sort without table look-up
and perhaps more involved heuristics (to handle dutch "ij", for example)
anyway, why not do something like this...

	0xxxxxxx	  Normal ASCII
	10xxxxxx	  Foreign ROMAN characters
	11xxxxxx xxxxxxxx Kanji or other extended character

...and just stuff all the foreign variants into the 64 extra characters this
makes available for the purpose.

I know I said something like this before, but nobody seems to have noticed and
I am sufficiently egocentric to believe that there is something to it...
-- 
Name: Peter da Silva
Graphic: `-_-'
UUCP: ...!shell!{graffiti,baylor}!peter
IAEF: ...!kitty!baylor!peter