On Friday, June 6, 2014 10:18:41 PM UTC+5:30, Chris Angelico wrote: > On Sat, Jun 7, 2014 at 2:21 AM, Rustom Mody wrote: > > Combine that with Chris': > >> Yes and no. "ASCII" means two things: Firstly, it's a mapping from the > >> letter A to the number 65, from the exclamation mark to 33, from the > >> backslash to 92, and so on. And secondly, it's an encoding of those > >> numbers into the lowest seven bits of a byte, with the high byte left > >> clear. Between those two, you get a means of representing the letter > >> 'A' as the byte 0x41, and one of them is an encoding. > > and the situation appears quite the opposite of Ethan's description: > > In the 'old world' ASCII was both mapping and encoding and so there was > > never a justification to distinguish encoding from codepoint. > > It is unicode that demands these distinctions. > > If we could magically go to a world where the number of bits in a byte was > > 32 > > all this headache would go away. [Actually just 21 is enough!]
> An ASCII mentality lets you be sloppy. That doesn't mean the > distinction doesn't exist. When I first started programming in C, int > was *always* 16 bits long and *always* little-endian (because I used > only one compiler). I could pretend that those bits in memory actually > were that integer, that there were no other ways that integer could be > encoded. That doesn't mean that encodings weren't important. And as > soon as I started working on a 32-bit OS/2 system, and my ints became > bigger, I had to concern myself with that. Even more so when I got > into networking, and byte order became important to me. And of course, > these days I work with integers that are encoded in all sorts of > different ways (a Python integer isn't just a puddle of bytes in > memory), and I generally let someone else take care of the details, > but the encodings are still there. > ASCII was once your one companion, it was all that mattered. ASCII was > once a friendly encoding, then your world was shattered. Wishing it > were somehow here again, wishing it were somehow near... sometimes it > seemed, if you just dreamed, somehow it would be here! Wishing you > could use just bytes again, knowing that you never would... dreaming > of it won't help you to do all that you dream you could! > It's time to stop chasing the phantom and start living in the Raoul > world... err, the real world. :) I thought that "If only bytes were 21+ bits wide" would sound sufficiently nonsensical, that I did not need to explicitly qualify it as a utopian dream! -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
