PMP Mail Archive: PMP> Evidence of the confusion about what "ASCII" means

PMP> Evidence of the confusion about what "ASCII" means

Tom Hastings (hastings@cp10.es.xerox.com)
Thu, 24 Jul 1997 17:17:45 PDT

I don't mean to pick on HP here but rather to give evidence of
confusion about the term "ASCII" that we cite in the Printer MIB
in one place on page 14 that covers all 25 OCTET STRING objects.

Bob Pentecost sent the following quote from the PJL manual (in a JMP
discussion):

To quote the PJL Tech Ref Manual, PJL "strings consist of any combination of
characters from ASCII 32 through 255, plus ASCII 9 (horizontal tab),
excluding ASCII 34 (quotation marks)."

So there is confusion about what "ASCII" means in the Printer MIB.

To others of us, "ASCII" in the Printer MIB meant ANSI X3.4 US-ASCII
which only defines code positions 0 to 127, but can be used in a 7-bit
environment (0 to 127) or in an 8-bit environment (0 to 255).

This is evidence enough for me that we need to improve the Printer MIB
specification of "ASCII", by citing the ANSI X3.4 standard.

Tom