control characters

[muta...@gmail.com]

I need to repurpose 6 ASCII control characters to be used
for Vietnamese display characters. I don't like the 6 that
VISCII chose. I don't want to give up anything that is used
in the software I use, including micro-emacs keystrokes.
Here is the list:

0 - ctrl-@ - used by C etc.
1 - ctrl-A - used by micro-emacs
2 - ctrl-B - AVAILABLE
3 - ctrl-C - used to break programs
4 - ctrl-D - used to indicate EOF in Unix
5 - ctrl-E - used by micro-emacs
6 - ctrl-F - ACK - may be AVAILABLE
7 - ctrl-G - used by micro-emacs and to beep
8 - ctrl-H - used as backspace
9 - ctrl-I - tab
A - ctrl-J - newline
B - ctrl-K - used by micro-emacs
C - ctrl-L - used by micro-emacs
D - ctrl-M - carriage return
E - ctrl-N - AVAILABLE
F - ctrl-O - AVAILABLE
10 - ctrl-P - AVAILABLE
11 - ctrl-Q - used for XON
12 - ctrl-R - formfeed, AVAILABLE
13 - ctrl-S - XOFF and used by micro-emacs
14 - ctrl-T - AVAILABLE
15 - ctrl-U - NAK - may be AVAILABLE
16 - ctrl-V - used by micro-emacs, but if page-down works can be made available
17 - ctrl-W - used by nano - may be AVAILABLE
18 - ctrl-X - used by micro-emacs
19 - ctrl-Y - used by micro-emacs
1A - ctrl-Z - used for EOF by MSDOS
1B - ctrl-[ - ESC
1C - ctrl-\ - used by Unix to kill process
1D - ctrl-] - used by Telnet to get prompt
1E - ctrl-^ - AVAILABLE
1F - ctrl-_ - AVAILABLE

I think we're in business. 7 available control characters
when we only need 6. I'd say we leave ctrl-B alone as I
think some people use that.

BFN. Paul.

[Elijah Stone]

On Mon, 14 Jun 2021, muta...@gmail.com wrote:

> I need to repurpose 6 ASCII control characters to be used for Vietnamese
> display characters

- If you're using utf-8, why not use the unicode versions of those characters?

- If you're not using utf-8, why not use a full 8-bit character set?

[muta...@gmail.com]

On Saturday, June 19, 2021 at 5:15:54 PM UTC+10, Elijah Stone wrote:
> On Mon, 14 Jun 2021, muta...@gmail.com wrote:
>
> > I need to repurpose 6 ASCII control characters to be used for Vietnamese
> > display characters

> - If you're using utf-8, why not use the unicode versions of those characters?

I'm not using UTF-8.

> - If you're not using utf-8, why not use a full 8-bit character set?

I am using a full 8-bit character set. The Vietnamese have the
world's largest alphabet, and the only one that exceeds 8 bits
if you also include the existing 128 characters defined by
ASCII. It exceeds it by 6 characters, so 6 characters from
somewhere need to die. Unless you want to create 9-bit
characters. I'm not sure what hardware changes would be
required to support 9-bit chars/bytes. Adding another RAID
drive presumably isn't a problem. Giving up a parity bit for
RAM may be acceptable.

BFN. Paul.