The "no parity" dates back to when UCBLogo was pure ASCII and the backslashed-ness of a character was stored in the high bit of an 8-bit byte, sometimes called the "partiy bit" when dealing with hardware. However, FMSLogo has never used the "parity" bit for this and instead marked a backslashed character by moving character to a different place in the ASCII code page (analogous to shifting them all to 128-255 by setting the high bit). Now that FMSLogo uses Unicode, it's even further removed from using a "parity" bit, as the characters are now moved to a "private use area" of Unicode.
