--- In firebird-support@yahoogroups.com, "zifnabbe" wrote:

> Is there a big difference between ASCII and ISO8859_1 character set?

The purpose of an ASCII column, is to prohibit funny
'internatial' charcters to sneak into your data. As long,
as all charcter data are really ASCII (<=0x7F), automatic
conversion between charcter sets (which is trivial in this
case) does occur and you don't need to cast or use introducers.

This feature is plagued by two limitations.

a) It is not enforced with the same rigidiy as the relational
integrity is enforced. You can get non ASCII chars into the table
using valid SQL DML.

b) For FB, ASCII does include all control characters. But if
you want to have some restrictions on character repertoire for
a column, most likely you don't want control characters.

Regards,
Peter Jacobi