Re: Reviewing philosophies and assumptions

[Erik M. van der Poel <erik@xxxxxxxxx>]

Keld Simonsen writes:
> The Japanese use of 2022 for mail is well documented, but in Japanese.
> Their 2022 use is very well documented, as in EUC and other character
> set encoding use. It is quite wide-spread, as far as I know.
> It is in general use outside Japan, as it is available with every
> X implementation - standard. I think you can call X "a real
> implementation".

You mean `kterm', right? Yes, kterm can understand ISO 2022 escape
sequences for Japanese. And newer kterms can understand other
sequences too, such as those for Chinese. Sony's mterm understands
many different sequences, including several for Europe, and does the
appropriate codepoint mapping to be able to use an ISO 8859-1 font.

However, software such as mterm that does the Right Thing for many
different escape sequences is probably relatively rare, so even if we
suddenly adopt ISO 2022 for exchanging mail all over the world, many
people will not be able to display languages other than their own (and
English). But at least it is possible to send messages over SMTP if
ISO 2022 is used in this way, i.e. 7-bit only.

No conclusions here. Draw your own. :-)


> Well, if we can have an encoding in pure 7-bit of the full character 
> repertoire needed, then any MTA - including
> bitnet, decnet, uucp should be able to run transparent?

I'm not sure if B-news is relevant in this discussion, but I have been
told that people had to fix B-news to be able to include escape
sequences.


Erik M. van der Poel                                      erik@sra.co.jp
Software Research Associates, Inc., Tokyo, Japan     TEL +81-3-3234-2692