Talk:Code page 437
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In addition to characters lifted from the Wang word processing set, some of the glyphs may have originated from work Gates did with Microsoft BASIC for Commodore International ... but I can't find any full character maps of all PETSCII glyphs including 0-31 ... http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/comphist/gates.htm
- In terms of Commodore PET, they started with us from the very beginning. Because we helped Chuck Pedal, who was at Commodore at that time, really think about the design of the machine. Adding lots of fun characters to the character set, things like smiley faces, and suit symbols.
- —Hobart 19:20, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
Isn't this code page also known as PC-8?
[edit] null
null character should be empty -- the ibm PC did not say "NULL" when the 0 byte was put into the frame buffer. the null, space, and blank characters (0x0, 0x20, and 0xff) were indistinguishable visually.
- I agree - so I changed it. -- 212.63.43.180 (talk) 21:12, 24 January 2008 (UTC)
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- However, characters 0, 32, and 255 were used differently in IBM PC files. The way the table has been, the NULL, SP, and NBSP texts link to relevant articles where people can read what the specific functions of those characters were -- whereas leaving things blank conveys no information. AnonMoos (talk) 22:33, 24 January 2008 (UTC)
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- I solved the issue by putting two sets of the table for values 0-31. Ricardo Cancho Niemietz (talk) 09:46, 29 January 2008 (UTC)
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- Sorry, I'm not a native english speaker (I'm from and live in Spain). Please, help requested. Ricardo Cancho Niemietz (talk) 12:54, 29 January 2008 (UTC)
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[edit] Multiple Bases
While the table header rows and Unicode are in hexadecimal, the CP437 is in decimal. This decreases the obviousness where the two encodings point to the same character. I would recommend making it entirely hexadecimal.
[edit] The overloaded character number 237 in CP437
The character for place 237 in the CP437 table should change from U+03D6 GREEK SMALL LETTER PHI to U+03D5 GREEK PHI SYMBOL.
In CP437, this position was used as U+03D5 GREEK PHI SYMBOL in italics, U+2205 EMPTY SET, U+2300 DIAMETER SIGN and even as a surrogate for U+00F8 LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH STROKE, but rarely as U+03D6 GREEK SMALL LETTER PHI due to its IBM original shape (it seems merely a circle with a slash) does not ressembles closely this greek lowercase letter.
Also, the character 238 effectively should be changed to U+2208 ELEMENT OF. In addition to be used as U+03B5 GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON, in some dot matrix ticket printers is used today as the U+20AC EURO SIGN, in the european countries where the euro is the official currency.
In other hand, the character 236 is the U+221E INFINITY, not a greek letter at all, so you should change its background colour to grey.
As you can see, characters 236 to 253 in CP437 was primary intended all for maths symbols, so the positions 237 and 238 are not "real" greek letters. In despite of that, many people has used these characters as greek letters (to name angles and so on), of course.
And another issue: the character 235, U+03B4 GREEK SMALL LETTER DELTA was also used as U+00F0 LATIN SMALL LETTER ETH, an icelandic latin character.
A popular math software for MS-DOS in the late 80's, "Derive", employs the full CP437 character set to display complex formulae, with very good results.
People is able to do incredible things with a very little means...
Yours Ricardo Cancho Niemietz (talk) 15:53, 25 January 2008 (UTC)
- I did the changes myself! :-D Ricardo Cancho Niemietz (talk) 14:00, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
