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ISO/IEC 646
ISO/IEC 646 Information technology — ISO 7-bit coded character set for information interchange, is an ISO/IEC standard in the field of character encoding. It is equivalent to the ECMA standard ECMA-6 and developed in cooperation with ASCII at least since 1964. The first version of ECMA-6 had been published in 1965, based on work the ECMA's Technical Committee TC1 had carried out since December 1960. The first edition of ISO/IEC 646 was published in 1973, and the most recent, third, edition in 1991.
ISO/IEC 646 specifies a 7-bit character code from which several national standards are derived. It allocates a set of 82 unique graphic characters to 7-bit code points, known as the invariant (INV) or basic character set, including letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet, digits, and some common English punctuation. It leaves 12 code points to be allocated by conforming national standards for additional letters of Latin-based alphabets or other symbols.
It also defines the International Reference Version (IRV), including a full allocation of 94 graphic characters, to be used when a specific national version is not required. As of the 1991 edition of ISO/IEC 646, the IRV and ASCII are identical. Previous editions differed in only one or two code points.
ISO/IEC 646 and its predecessor ASCII (ASA X3.4) largely endorsed existing practice regarding character encodings in the telecommunications industry.
As ASCII did not provide a number of characters needed for languages other than English, a number of national variants were made that substituted some less-used characters with needed ones. Due to the incompatibility of the various national variants, an International Reference Version (IRV) of ISO/IEC 646 was introduced, in an attempt to at least restrict the replaced set to the same characters in all variants. The original version (ISO 646 IRV) differed from ASCII only in that code point 0x24, ASCII's dollar sign $ was replaced by the international currency symbol ¤. The final 1991 version of the code ISO/IEC 646:1991 is also known as ITU T.50, International Reference Alphabet or IRA, formerly International Alphabet No. 5 (IA5). This standard allows users to exercise the 12 variable characters (i.e., two alternative graphic characters and 10 national defined characters). Among these exercises, ISO 646:1991 IRV (International Reference Version) is explicitly defined and identical to ASCII.
The ISO/IEC 8859 series of standards governing 8-bit character encodings supersede the ISO/IEC 646 international standard and its national variants, by providing 96 additional characters with the additional bit and thus avoiding any substitution of ASCII codes. The ISO/IEC 10646 standard, directly related to Unicode, supersedes all of the ISO646 and ISO/IEC 8859 sets with one unified set of character encodings using a larger 21-bit value.
A legacy of ISO/IEC 646 is visible on Windows, where in many East Asian locales the backslash character used in filenames is rendered as ¥ or other characters such as ₩. Despite the fact that a different code for ¥ was available even on the original IBM PC's code page 437, and a separate double-byte code for ¥ is available in Shift JIS (although this often uses alternative mapping), so much text was created with the backslash code used for ¥ (due to Shift_JIS being officially based on ISO 646:JP, although Microsoft maps it as ASCII) that even modern Windows fonts have found it necessary to render the code that way. A similar situation exists with ₩ and EUC-KR. Another legacy is the existence of trigraphs in the C programming language.
The following table shows the ISO/IEC 646:1991 International Reference Version character set. Each character is shown with its Unicode equivalent. Code points open for substitution in national variants are shown with a grey background. Yellow background indicates a character that, in some variants, could be combined with a previous character as a diacritic using the backspace character, which may affect glyph choice.
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ISO/IEC 646
ISO/IEC 646 Information technology — ISO 7-bit coded character set for information interchange, is an ISO/IEC standard in the field of character encoding. It is equivalent to the ECMA standard ECMA-6 and developed in cooperation with ASCII at least since 1964. The first version of ECMA-6 had been published in 1965, based on work the ECMA's Technical Committee TC1 had carried out since December 1960. The first edition of ISO/IEC 646 was published in 1973, and the most recent, third, edition in 1991.
ISO/IEC 646 specifies a 7-bit character code from which several national standards are derived. It allocates a set of 82 unique graphic characters to 7-bit code points, known as the invariant (INV) or basic character set, including letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet, digits, and some common English punctuation. It leaves 12 code points to be allocated by conforming national standards for additional letters of Latin-based alphabets or other symbols.
It also defines the International Reference Version (IRV), including a full allocation of 94 graphic characters, to be used when a specific national version is not required. As of the 1991 edition of ISO/IEC 646, the IRV and ASCII are identical. Previous editions differed in only one or two code points.
ISO/IEC 646 and its predecessor ASCII (ASA X3.4) largely endorsed existing practice regarding character encodings in the telecommunications industry.
As ASCII did not provide a number of characters needed for languages other than English, a number of national variants were made that substituted some less-used characters with needed ones. Due to the incompatibility of the various national variants, an International Reference Version (IRV) of ISO/IEC 646 was introduced, in an attempt to at least restrict the replaced set to the same characters in all variants. The original version (ISO 646 IRV) differed from ASCII only in that code point 0x24, ASCII's dollar sign $ was replaced by the international currency symbol ¤. The final 1991 version of the code ISO/IEC 646:1991 is also known as ITU T.50, International Reference Alphabet or IRA, formerly International Alphabet No. 5 (IA5). This standard allows users to exercise the 12 variable characters (i.e., two alternative graphic characters and 10 national defined characters). Among these exercises, ISO 646:1991 IRV (International Reference Version) is explicitly defined and identical to ASCII.
The ISO/IEC 8859 series of standards governing 8-bit character encodings supersede the ISO/IEC 646 international standard and its national variants, by providing 96 additional characters with the additional bit and thus avoiding any substitution of ASCII codes. The ISO/IEC 10646 standard, directly related to Unicode, supersedes all of the ISO646 and ISO/IEC 8859 sets with one unified set of character encodings using a larger 21-bit value.
A legacy of ISO/IEC 646 is visible on Windows, where in many East Asian locales the backslash character used in filenames is rendered as ¥ or other characters such as ₩. Despite the fact that a different code for ¥ was available even on the original IBM PC's code page 437, and a separate double-byte code for ¥ is available in Shift JIS (although this often uses alternative mapping), so much text was created with the backslash code used for ¥ (due to Shift_JIS being officially based on ISO 646:JP, although Microsoft maps it as ASCII) that even modern Windows fonts have found it necessary to render the code that way. A similar situation exists with ₩ and EUC-KR. Another legacy is the existence of trigraphs in the C programming language.
The following table shows the ISO/IEC 646:1991 International Reference Version character set. Each character is shown with its Unicode equivalent. Code points open for substitution in national variants are shown with a grey background. Yellow background indicates a character that, in some variants, could be combined with a previous character as a diacritic using the backspace character, which may affect glyph choice.