A while back, I found the glisp package (Apple, 1990), but frustrated
by the lack of formatting in some of the files, I didn't look at it
very closely at the time. Recent interests have brought the urge to
look at it again. Now, as then, I have a question about the character
set which Apple used in the sources.
One of the source files (Interpreter.glisp) has a block of escaped
character literals. In both Mozilla Firefox and the editor Kwrite, most
Western European encodings show holes (i.e., a box outline or a
question mark in a diamond, suggesting non-printable characters or
incomplete fonts) for one or more characters..
The only encoding that fills the holes in Kwrite is ibm850, but several
of the characters in it remind me of the old edge glyphs and dithered
boxes from the Commodore64 and other computers from the '80s. I tend to
doubt that ibm850 was the character set used by Apple in 1990, by which
time PC clones had already been around for a couple of years, and I
distinctly remember that PCs had dropped the box glyphs.
Firefox has an encoding called MacRoman, which fills all of the holes.
Some quick research identifies this as a proprietary Apple character
set, which would fit the puzzle, but I haven't found any references to
MacRoman dating back that far.
Can anyone familiar with Apple's glisp/mlisp/plisp confirm MacRoman or
identify another character set as that used in the package?
Thanks in advance.
Jack
In article <························@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com>,
"Jack" <············@msn.com> wrote:
> A while back, I found the glisp package (Apple, 1990), but frustrated
> by the lack of formatting in some of the files, I didn't look at it
> very closely at the time. Recent interests have brought the urge to
> look at it again. Now, as then, I have a question about the character
> set which Apple used in the sources.
>
> One of the source files (Interpreter.glisp) has a block of escaped
> character literals. In both Mozilla Firefox and the editor Kwrite, most
> Western European encodings show holes (i.e., a box outline or a
> question mark in a diamond, suggesting non-printable characters or
> incomplete fonts) for one or more characters..
>
> The only encoding that fills the holes in Kwrite is ibm850, but several
> of the characters in it remind me of the old edge glyphs and dithered
> boxes from the Commodore64 and other computers from the '80s. I tend to
> doubt that ibm850 was the character set used by Apple in 1990, by which
> time PC clones had already been around for a couple of years, and I
> distinctly remember that PCs had dropped the box glyphs.
>
> Firefox has an encoding called MacRoman, which fills all of the holes.
> Some quick research identifies this as a proprietary Apple character
> set, which would fit the puzzle, but I haven't found any references to
> MacRoman dating back that far.
>
> Can anyone familiar with Apple's glisp/mlisp/plisp confirm MacRoman or
> identify another character set as that used in the package?
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> Jack
MacRoman is shown here:
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/m/ma/mac-roman_encoding1.ht
m
I believe that chart has a slight error in the row for 7x. It should
have the following:
7B {
7C |
7D }
7E ~
7F DEL
System 7, which I believe was released around 1991, used an encoding
almost identical to MacRoman. I think the only notable difference was
that code DB had a different glyph. Also, codes 11-14 had special
glyphs in the system font Chicago (cloverleaf, check, diamond, apple),
which were not present in other fonts.
If you go back before System 7, then there were even fewer glyphs
defined. Specifically, codes D9-FF were unspecified but reserved for
future use.
Dave
>MacRoman is shown here:
>http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/m/ma/mac-roman_encoding...
>
>
>I believe that chart has a slight error in the row for 7x. It should
>have the following:
>7B {
>7C |
>7D }
>7E ~
>7F DEL
Wikipedia filled in the blanks at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacRoman
with an almost identical page--with the same text before the table and
the same background colors in the table. One obviously lifted it from
the other.
Good memory. You were spot on about the missing glyphs.
Thanks to everyone for the details. Problem solved. Case closed.
- Jack
From: Robert Uhl
Subject: Re: Historical Query Re Apple's Glisp
Date:
Message-ID: <m38xw0qjt5.fsf@4dv.net>
"Jack" <············@msn.com> writes:
>>MacRoman is shown here:
>>http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/encyclopedia/m/ma/mac-roman_encoding...
>>
>>I believe that chart has a slight error in the row for 7x. It should
>>have the following:
>
>>7B {
>>7C |
>>7D }
>>7E ~
>>7F DEL
>
> Wikipedia filled in the blanks at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacRoman
> with an almost identical page--with the same text before the table and
> the same background colors in the table. One obviously lifted it from
> the other.
Wikipedia's license allows it to be used by other sites; there are quite
a few now which use its data to fill there own--and by using search
engine trickery some of them manage to get higher Google rankings, sadly
enough.
Wikipedia does also use some other sources of free information, properly
referenced of course.
--
Robert Uhl <http://public.xdi.org/=ruhl>
Cooking is great--it's a socially acceptable excuse to play with knives
and fire.
In article <························@o13g2000cwo.googlegroups.com>,
"Jack" <············@msn.com> wrote:
> Firefox has an encoding called MacRoman, which fills all of the holes.
> Some quick research identifies this as a proprietary Apple character
> set, which would fit the puzzle, but I haven't found any references to
> MacRoman dating back that far.
Only because perhaps no one had coined that name yet. The character set
itself hasn't changed since 1984. There was no standard way to use
codes from 128 - 255 at that time.
--
Bruce | 41.1670S | \ spoken | -+-
Hoult | 174.8263E | /\ here. | ----------O----------