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In Windows-125* code pages (and actually, in corresponding ISO* ones too), certain character codes don't have a corresponding character defined. What was the premise behind leaving some of the character codes without a character? windows-1252 - missing glyphs

My understanding of the issue would be: if 7-bit based code pages weren't enough and multiple 8-bit code pages had to be invented, then those 8-bit code pages (learning from previous experiences) should have as many characters as it is possible, whereas in reality some character codes lack a character.

Martin Ba
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colemik
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    The question is both off-topic (it is not about programming) and non-constructive (tends to spawn opinions and speculations or, at best, notes on history rather than answers to technical problems). – Jukka K. Korpela Dec 31 '13 at 08:51
  • Besides, “glyph” is a wrong term here; no *characters* are allocated to those positions. – Jukka K. Korpela Dec 31 '13 at 08:53
  • @JukkaK.Korpela, after rethinking, I agree with Jukka - the question is sort of offtopic. I just really wanted to hear a confirmation like: some characters were left like this because of standardization issues (~the design of the whole *set* of code pages had to be consistent) / C1 codes have nothing to do with it. No useful information will come out of the answer to the question besides speculation. And thanks for the correction on the nomenclature. – colemik Dec 31 '13 at 09:27

1 Answers1

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They are left empty for future expansion.

There probably won't be any future expansion now: we have Unicode for new characters, and encoding mapping information is something that is now widely deployed on a network basis, instead of being considered local to a single machine, so making changes to those mappings would hurt everyone.

But in the past there have been additions. Most notably the Euro sign: if MS had allocated all the bytes from day one then it would have been impossible to add this symbol, so all legacy Windows applications would have been unable to display currency properly. cp1252 also gained some characters from Central European languages later in its lifespan.

bobince
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