The article mentions that at one point the ASCII standard moved the alphabetic characters one space to the left, because the author happened to have examined a phone directory while visiting Copenhagen and noted that Denmark sorts its three accented characters at the end of their alphabet.
An interesting trivium: the IRC protocol lets users choose their own nicknames, and demands that nicknames be compared in a case-insensitive manner. For the purposes of IRC, you must treat {|} as the 'lower-case' versions of [\], because IRC was invented in Scandinavia and it did indeed use those character-codes for accented characters.
No specific character set is specified. The protocol is based on a
set of codes which are composed of eight (8) bits, making up an
octet. Each message may be composed of any number of these octets;
however, some octet values are used for control codes, which act as
message delimiters.
Regardless of being an 8-bit protocol, the delimiters and keywords
are such that protocol is mostly usable from US-ASCII terminal and a
telnet connection.
Because of IRC's Scandinavian origin, the characters {}|^ are
considered to be the lower case equivalents of the characters []\~,
respectively. This is a critical issue when determining the
equivalence of two nicknames or channel names."
Comments
The article mentions that at one point the ASCII standard moved the alphabetic characters one space to the left, because the author happened to have examined a phone directory while visiting Copenhagen and noted that Denmark sorts its three accented characters at the end of their alphabet.
An interesting trivium: the IRC protocol lets users choose their own nicknames, and demands that nicknames be compared in a case-insensitive manner. For the purposes of IRC, you must treat {|} as the 'lower-case' versions of [\], because IRC was invented in Scandinavia and it did indeed use those character-codes for accented characters.
And here I suspected you were trolling... (in that case, if you've successfully trolled the RFC - more power to you :)
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2812#section-2.2
" 2.2 Character codes