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   MAKENL_NG      MakeNL Next Generation.      1,725 messages   

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   Message 1,192 of 1,725   
   Bj”rn Felten to Michiel van der Vlist   
   The seven-bit restriction   
   03 Feb 14 17:24:38   
   
   My previous response aside.   
      
    MvdV> It doesn't. For some time now - on my suggestion - it supports this   
   option:   
      
    MvdV> Allow8bit 1   
      
      I know. But I don't understand why we even need this. As I said, I   
   completely disabled (made a conditional zero jump) that check in my 1999   
   patch. Who would even want to *not* allow it? Get rid of all that code   
   completely, for fucks sake!   
      
    MvdV> There is just one little problem. Just as the ASCII only restriction is   
    MvdV> not fair to the world outside the part where the native US English   
    MvdV> speakers live, it would not be fair to restrict it to those that can   
    MvdV> spell their name or city properly in CP437, CP850 or LATIN-1.   
      
      Who cares? The nodelist will be totally backward compatible even if we put   
   Chinese letters in it. Only stone-age editors, that tries to pick up   
   recipients names from the nodelist based on nodenumbers, will possibly break.   
      
      The nodelist is nothing but a database that is supposed to be read and   
   interpreted by programs. Not to be read by low-ASCII brainwashed persons.   
      
      As nodelist reading programs evolves, so should what we allow into this   
   common database of ours.   
      
    MvdV> I we allow more than ASCII, we should allow ALL Fidonet participants to   
    MvdV> have their name properly spelled. Unfortunately there is no single 8 bit   
    MvdV> character set that can fulfil this requirement, and having a different   
    MvdV> character encoding scheme for each line is ehh.. unpractical.   
      
      Nah, lets do it! Nobody think that the nodelist will grow bigger any more.   
   So what if it suddenly becomes twice the size (as with every character   
   16-bit). Not that it will ever happen, but still, so what?   
      
   --- Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; sv-SE; rv:1.9.1.16) Gecko/20101125   
    * Origin: news://felten.yi.org (2:203/2)   

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