Re: Suggested character set policy for the IETF

[Walter Ian Kaye <walter@natural-innovations.com>]

At 5:10p -0700 06/30/97, Ned Freed wrote:
 > What matters is that the definition allow this sort of information as
 > an output of the charset to character conversion process.
 >
 > We could of course do this by amending the definition of a character in
 > RFC2130 to mean "graphic or control character". But then we're left with
 > the task of defining a "control character". Because of this I actually
 > prefer language that equates "character" with "graphic symbol" and talking
 > about the conversion process also producing control information an output.
 > I think we can get away with not defining "control information"
 > specifically; I don't think the same is true for "control character".

Here is my own personal definition (which I came up with about a week ago):

  A "control" character is one which can be interpreted as an instruction
  to treat the characters which follow it in a different way than they
  would be treated if they did not follow that character.

In this case, "treated" means treated by the machine, not the human
(otherwise someone might consider "s" a control character when it
precedes the characters "h","i","t"...). ;)

__________________________________________________________________________
  Walter Ian Kaye <boo_at_best*com>    Programmer - Excel, AppleScript,
          Mountain View, CA                         ProTERM, FoxPro, HTML
 http://www.natural-innovations.com/     Musician - Guitarist, Songwriter