> From: Clyde Smith-Stubbs > To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU > Subject: Re: Mail formatting > Date: Tuesday, 1 July 1997 19:42 > > On Tue, Jul 01, 1997 at 07:16:19PM +0930, Mike Smith wrote: > > > Yes, I understand that, but how long is the 'lowest common denominator' > > factor going to hold? 1, 10, 100 years? Ascii's been going at least 10, > > but I'd hate to be still using it in 20 years. > > At least 10? A little off, methinks. I've been using it for 25 years, so 'At least' implies 10 or more. Since (25 >= 10) == TRUE , my statement holds. I used 10 as that was the midrange of my series of numbers, I suppose I could have said 2.5, 25, 250 ; but it seemed clumsy, and the human mind is fairly used to dealing with base 10. > the prospect of still using it in another 20 doesn't hold any great fear. Ascii is nice to program with, but I'm sure an RTF app, if it found straight ascii, could handle it. > Probably the chief objection to ASCII is that it doesn't cater for > languages with non-ASCII glyphs, like umlauts and accents. Whither Unicode? Nice if you use NT, where it is default. 95 will live with it, in a begrudging manner. The notion of pushing it into legacy 3.11 apps - no way! MikeS