Euro and 7 bits

The Second CEN/TC304 Workshop on the Euro was held on Thursday, 1997-10-16,
and the recent proposal by Manuel Tomas Carrasco Benitez to replace a
character in ASCII with the EURO SIGN was discussed.

The Workshop made no formal recommendation on this matter, because it
appeared that no recommendation was necessary. The solution proposed is
untenable, and other solutions are already available to users in 7-bit
environments.

1) Use the three letter code EUR. This is the simplest solution.

2) Use, in accordance with clause 7 of ISO 646:1981, use BACKSPACE or
CARRIAGE RETURN to create the EURO SIGN out of C and =.
(The Workshop did not discuss text transfer between text encoded in such a
fashion and text encoded according to ISO 8859 and ISO 10646, but it seems
to me that this is not trivial.)

3) Derive, in accordance with clause 6.4.3 of ISO 646:1981, a coded
character set based on the coded character set described in ISO 646:1991.
Such a derived character set would need to be registered in ISO 2375 for
anyone to take any notice. Positions which can be used for this are:

40 5B 5C 5D 5E 60 7B 7C 7D 7E, or @ [ \ ] ^ ` { | } ~

The Workshop hoped that time and bandwidth would not be further spent on
this issue, at least not on the Unicode and TC304 mailing lists. The
solutions have been outlined above.

The minutes and recommendations of the Euro Workshop will be distributed
via the Web when they have been proofed and tidied up.

Best regards,

--
Michael Everson, Everson Gunn Teoranta
15 Port Chaeimhghein Íochtarach; Baile Átha Cliath 2; Éire (Ireland)
Gutháin:  +353 1 478-2597, +353 1 283-9396
http://www.indigo.ie/egt
27 Páirc an Fhéithlinn; Baile an Bhóthair; Co. Átha Cliath; Éire

Received on Sunday, 19 October 1997 08:13:28 UTC