What is the ASCII table and How Do You Use It?

[William_J_G Overington]

It is interesting that the printing ASCII characters are the characters 
that are the underlying characters of most of the tag characters of 
plane 14.  So any use of tags in present or future Unicode encoding is 
effectively restricted to ASCII characters.
 
Reading about ASCII in this thread reminded me of when, in the early 
1990s, I devised a way to express Esperanto text using 7-bit ASCII.  I 
think I got it working, just locally, programmned in Pascal.
 
As far as I am aware the system has never been applied in practice and 
has been overtaken by technological advances, yet perhaps will have some 
interest as to what was done many years ago with the technology 
available at the time.
 
Yet one aspect of that exercise in encoding information remains, namely 
the concept of the software unicorn. I wrote about software unicorns in 
a story that I wrote in 1998, the story detailing the encoding system 
that I mentioned earlier in this post. The story placed on the web at 
that time and still there now.
  
The web page includes two illustrations of software unicorns, 
constructed by adapting clip art from Microsoft Office at that time. I 
ungrouped one clip art picture so as to place a software unicorn between 
two layers of the clip art image. I used the PowerPoint program to do 
that.
 
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/euto0008.htm 
<http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/euto0008.htm>
 
There was also a software unicorn screensaver, also constructed by 
adapting Microsoft Office clip art.
 
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/euto2001.htm
 
It was great as the software unicorns went across the screen slowly, 
each at its own pace, so there was an everchanging display. I have not 
been able to get it to work on later computers.
 
Yet ASCII still underlies much of the internet. For example, some years 
later I wrote the following about software unicorns. The text includes 
an accented character, an a circumflex, and I am not sure whether this 
email system will send that character correctly, and if it does, will 
the accented character appear correctly in the record of this post in 
the archive of the Unicode mailing list. Hopefully it will all work, but 
if it is not ASCII then there is sometimes the possibility that things 
will not work properly.
 
A castle of software
in imagery seen
as a château in turquoise
and three shades of green:
yet a castle of software
can fall to the ground
if over its drawbridge
their golden hooves pound
 
More recently, I have included the software unicorns in my first novel, 
mostly in Chapter 21, and in a song in Chapter 60.
 
I am using sequences of ASCII characters, each code being an exclamation 
mark followed by digits, in my research on communicating through the 
language barrier in some particular circumstances. I am deliberately 
only using ASCII characters for this as I hope that at some future time 
the Unicode Technical Committee will encode what are at present ASCII 
codes as tag sequences in Unicode thereby helping my research to become 
widely applied as such an encoding will add interoperability and avoid 
ambiguity and avoid any concerns over using the system related to 
concerns about perceived intellectual property issues.
 
William Overington
 
Thursday 4 April 2024
 
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/ 
<http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/>
 
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