Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

queue.acm.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 291 posts

Re: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

#91

Post by Quekid5 »

drdec wrote: post #60
scrollaway wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A variable named ω is no better than a list named l. Both are bad. Be explicit. Terse, but explicit.

Part of the problem here is that a variable in mathematics is a different concept from a variable in programming. Mathematicians are used to using one letter variables. Using a set of unwritten naming rules, mathematicians almost always know what concepts the variables are referring to (in a mathematical context). So, I'd say if the code is only to be maintained by mathematicians, one letter variables for mathematica…

I'm also under the impression that mathematicians generally work much more deeply with a smaller set of variables, so you actually don't need to name that many individual concepts.

A typical program contains thousands and thousands of "named things", so you're naturally going to see a proliferation of names. That just doesn't seem to be that necessary in math once you're working in a particular context (e.g. statistics).

Re: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

#93

Post by slver »

universa1 wrote: post #86
dsr_ wrote: post #77

If it's not on the keyboard, nobody is going to type it. Solutions: a) only use characters in the intersection of the top N most popular keyboard layouts b) issue programmers' keyboards with an agreed character set c) issue programmers' keypads with supplementary characters d) add on-screen supplementary keypads

Hmm, Julia begs to differ, with most editors replacing lambda with the lambda Unicode symbol for example.

Using ligatures (of sort) in presenting code doesn't mean the code itself is not ASCII. Plus, let's see mainstream languages adopt this, I doubt they will. Languages do stupid things all the time.

Re: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

#94

Post by leephillips »

eterevsky wrote: post #48
sharikous wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having to do math and physics heavy work, I very much support the "fad" of having Unicode literals. "omega_0" is much worse than "ω_0" especially if you have tons of these variables. If you don't do math it's difficult to understand, but try writing without the alphabet and expressing the same concepts. Possible but clunky

I have a degree in math and I disagree with this. ω_0 definitely looks better than omega_0, but it is much harder to enter unless you have a special keyboard setup. Suppose you write a function that uses a variable ω_0, and somebody else wants to change it. Unless they have the same keyboard setup as you, they will have to just copy-past it everywhere. And what if you have several variable with special names?

You don’t need a “special keyboard setup”. Linux with X11 can do this out of the box. Add a line to your xmodmap file to put the dead Greek key where you want, and you’re done. I type ω by tapping a modifier key and then w. It’s even easier than typing W, because I don’t even have to hold down the modifier.

Re: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

#95

Post by krylon »

jotadambalakiri wrote: post #92

We literally have to: https://github.com/ASCII-Rightholders/the_characters Unless, of course, we want to buy the not too generously priced license

I'm fairly certain that is a joke. Or a very badly done scam.

Either way, I doubt anyone can claim a copyright on ASCII.

Re: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

#96

Post by hnfong »

afr0ck wrote: post #87
benjaminjosephw wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But "everyone" doesn't have the same keyboard nor does everyone speak the same language. ASCII is not a universal character set and treating it as such is nothing short of cultural imperialism: "If it's good enough for us, it's good enough for everyone". Artificial limits on language and characters sets might sound simple to you but it introduces a lot of complexity for others. Unicode code solves that problem with n…

What's the purpose of supporting other character sets in a language's syntax? Good luck finding contributors from all over the world for a software written in Turkish characters. I mean for hobbyists or very special purpose cases where such a thing is really needed (writing code in Turkish or Chinese or Arabic or whatever), people can add language support for that (after all it's just a bunch of keywords). It needs s…

Not sure about Turkish, but I know for a fact that when you have a team of Chinese devs work on a Chinese software project Mandarin starts to show up in the codebase. And while usually it's written in pinyin (the standard Chinese romanization system) since most programming languages assume ASCII, it's obvious that those people could benefit from being able to use Chinese characters in place of ASCII and English.

If your argument is "sure, then let them invent/fork $LANGUAGE to suit their needs", just take note that if you're a language designer/developer that wants to see the language widely adopted, it's detrimental to have the attitude that ASCII is enough for everybody. There's no reason to have (for example) "Arabic-python" just because somebody insists on ASCII instead of UTF-8 even though there's little technical reason not to support it.

Re: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

#97

Post by umvi »

leephillips wrote: post #94
eterevsky wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a degree in math and I disagree with this. ω_0 definitely looks better than omega_0, but it is much harder to enter unless you have a special keyboard setup. Suppose you write a function that uses a variable ω_0, and somebody else wants to change it. Unless they have the same keyboard setup as you, they will have to just copy-past it everywhere. And what if you have several variable with special names?

You don’t need a “special keyboard setup”. Linux with X11 can do this out of the box. Add a line to your xmodmap file to put the dead Greek key where you want, and you’re done. I type ω by tapping a modifier key and then w. It’s even easier than typing W, because I don’t even have to hold down the modifier.

That... sounds like a special keyboard setup to me.

Re: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

#98

Post by jfk13 »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #55
michaelmrose wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In emacs counsel-unicode-char brings up a menu where you type to narrow for example entering trademark gives you both the ® and ™ On my phone's keyboard typing the words registered or trademark bring up those options as completions. Word and libre office have the menu under insert I actually like the emacs version the best. One could even rig up a deal with emacs client to effectively use it outside of emacs by poppi…

Ah, cool function that I did not know about before, thank you! Any idea, why it does not list all unicode characters? For example, if I search for what charmap shows me as description of "你", "you, second person pronoun", then the results in Emacs are empty.

Presumably the lookup is based on Unicode character names. The name of "你" is CJK UNIFIED IDEOGRAPH-4F60.

Charmap must be showing you information from some sort of dictionary entry or similar, but that's not part of the identity or name of the Unicode character, any more than the name of the Unicode character U+0049 "I" is "first person singular pronoun" (it's actually named LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I); that's just what it happens to mean in one particular language.

Re: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

#99

Post by HKH2 »

zajio1am wrote: post #73
benjaminjosephw wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But "everyone" doesn't have the same keyboard nor does everyone speak the same language. ASCII is not a universal character set and treating it as such is nothing short of cultural imperialism: "If it's good enough for us, it's good enough for everyone". Artificial limits on language and characters sets might sound simple to you but it introduces a lot of complexity for others. Unicode code solves that problem with n…

> ASCII is not a universal character set and treating it as such is nothing short of cultural imperialism: "If it's good enough for us, it's good enough for everyone". SI units like meters and kilograms are also cultural imperialism and we should return to diversity of units, ideally different one for each town. /s

Railway track gauges came to mind.

Re: Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010)

#100

Post by hnfong »

ttt0 wrote: post #67
selfhoster11 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? English is a convention only, not a law of computing.

The Tower of Babel. If the source code is proprietary or for education then it doesn't matter, but for the open source world it'd mean division onto multiple different languages where no one can understand and learn from each other. No one is going to learn 5 different alphabets and 12 different languages just so they can understand the source code.

Realistically, English will still the lingua franca for software in the short-term future, and I don't think anyone is saying we should change this. The thing is, for many people "interacting with the worldwide programming community" is not a thing they need.

Imagine a computer class teacher in (for example) China teaching primary school children. Why should they need to learn English before starting to write "Hello world!" (or rather, 「你好世界」)

In an alternate universe the lingua franca of programming languages is Chinese, would you still make the claim that it's better to take away choices and force ALL programmers into using the existing lingua franca regardless of their background?

I'm guessing you'd be crying cultural imperialism because you can't teach your 6 year old kid programming in your native language.

Post reply on HN