On 07/15/18 17:17, MRAB wrote:
On 2018-07-16 00:10, Jim Lee wrote:
On 07/15/18 16:04, Chris Angelico wrote:
You claimed that Unicode was insignificant to many programs. I'm
trying to say that a Unicode text string is a vital part of any
program that works with text, which is pretty much anything that talks
to humans. You keep saying that ... well you keep saying different
things, and I've lost track of what your point actually is, but you
want a way to... disable Unicode? Or something? And you have yet to
give any example of a program that doesn't need Unicode, but still
uses text.
ChrisA
Why does this seem so obtuse to you?
Have you never heard of programming BEFORE Unicode existed?
How ever did we get along? It must have been a hallucination...
It wasn't a hallucination, but it was annoying having to deal with
code pages.
Yes, it was. However, dealing with Unicode is also annoying. If there
were only one encoding, such as UTF-8, I wouldn't mind so much.
The UK had a version of ASCII that had £ instead of #, France had a
version that had both that and ç instead of some character, etc, and,
more than once, someone has posted here code that has ¥ instead of \.
Someone on the Auxlang list used to complain about the alphabet used
by Esperanto because of some of its letters. He was eventually
persuaded to try switching to Unicode and UTF-8. He reported that the
switch was a lot easier than he'd expected (because, as had been
pointed out, any decent software he was using would already support
Unicode, or, if it didn't, there would be an alternative that did).
After the switch, he didn't see those letters as a problem any more!
But I don't speak Esperanto, and my programs don't generally care what
characters are used for European currencies. When I create a simple
program that takes a text file (created by me) and munges it into a
different format, I don't care if someone from Uzbekistan can read it or
not. When I create a one-time use program to visualize some data on a
graph, I don't care if anyone else can read the axis labels but me.
These are realities. A good programming language will allow for these
realities without putting the burden on the programmer to turn *every*
program into a politically correct, globalization compliant model of
modern groupthink.
-Jim
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