Subject: Re: swi jpl character coding

From: "Richard A. O'Keefe" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Dec 2000 11:56:19 +1300 (NZDT)

Paul Singleton <[email-masked]> wrote:
	> Assuming UTF-8 you could make the atom start with an illegal sequence
	> and add a foreign routine to return its type.
	
	OK, that's neat: let's have UTF-8 for textual names, hooks for optional
	custom handling of non-UTF-8 atoms (with some default catch-all handling).
	
	NB is there some de facto standard type system we should be using, e.g.
	those MIME type thingies?
	
There is an international standard for typing strings so that you know
how they are encoded:  ISO 2022.  It really only makes sense for code
switching in large chunks of text.

For example, the SGML declaration used by SGMLS includes
       BASESET  "ISO 646-1983//CHARSET
                 International Reference Version (IRV)//ESC 2/5 4/0"
and <ESC> <0x25> <0x40> is the escape sequence that announces ASCII.