Update: I'm wrong. These people are too. An explanation of ISO 646 I found here pretty much sums it up: "ASCII uses only 7 bits and allows the most significant eighth bit to be used as parity bit, highlight bit, end-of-string bit (all of which are considered bad practice nowadays) or to include additional characters for internationalization (i18n for which we need 8bit-clean programs that do none of afore-mentioned silly tricks) but ASCII defined no standard for this and many manufacturers invented their own proprietary codepages." Sorry.