On Thursday, February 26, 2015 at 6:10:25 PM UTC+5:30, Rustom Mody wrote: > On Wednesday, February 25, 2015 at 2:12:09 AM UTC+5:30, Dave Angel wrote: > > On 02/24/2015 02:57 PM, Laura Creighton wrote: > > > Dave Angel > > > are you another Native English speaker living in a world where ASCII > > > is enough? > > > > I'm a native English speaker, and 7 bits is not nearly enough. Even if > > I didn't currently care, I have some history: > > > > No. CDC display code is enough. Who needs lowercase? > > > > No. Baudot code is enough. > > > > No, EBCDIC is good enough. Who cares about other companies. > > > > No, the "golf-ball" only holds this many characters. If we need more, > > we can just get the operator to switch balls in the middle of printing. > > > > No. 2 digit years is enough. This world won't last till the millennium > > anyway. > > > > No. 2k is all the EPROM you can have. Your code HAS to fit in it, and > > only 1.5k RAM. > > > > No. 640k is more than anyone could need. > > > > No, you cannot use a punch card made on a model 26 keypunch in the same > > deck as one made on a model 29. Too bad, many of the codes are > > different. (This one cost me travel back and forth between two > > different locations with different model keypunches) > > > > No. 8 bits is as much as we could ever use for characters. Who could > > possibly need names or locations outside of this region? Or from > > multiple places within it? > > > > 35 years ago I helped design a serial terminal that "spoke" Chinese, > > using a two-byte encoding. But a single worldwide standard didn't come > > until much later, and I cheered Unicode when it was finally unveiled. > > > > I've worked with many printers that could only print 70 or 80 unique > > characters. The laser printer, and even the matrix printer are > > relatively recent inventions. > > Wrote something up on why we should stop using ASCII: > http://blog.languager.org/2015/02/universal-unicode.html
Dave's list above of instances of 'poverty is a good idea' turning out stupid and narrow-minded in hindsight is neat. Thought I'd ack that explicitly. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
