Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33 (2010) • Hacker News Board

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

#251

Post by kaba0 » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 12:01 AM UTC

kennywinker wrote: post #242

kaba0 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about Gauss’s distribution’s density function? Or a numerically stable version of a simpler formula? Also, you forgot the usual case of implementing a whitepaper with mathematical notation. It is much easier to proof read that, when you copy largely the same in your program as well. And if you pass in the readable energy, mass, etc variables, inside the function you can use the domain-specific mathematical notati…

I think we might be arguing different points. I'm not saying use different variable names from the canonical math version - I'm saying the canonical math version should use variable names instead of symbols. So per your point - I'm not qualified to re-define mathematical notation so I won't go very far with it, but taking the formula you mentioned, Gaussian distribution density function (not focusing on the fact that…

I accept your position, and perhaps my examples for a difficult formula was not difficult enough — my point is more along the line that the underlying structure of a formula becomes more easily visible with shorter symbols — and for syntactic manipulation one can more easily see patterns emerge.

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

#252

Post by taeric » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 12:02 AM UTC

a1369209993 wrote: post #248

creata wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean ∑ and Σ? Yeah, that'd be terrible. It doesn't seem like it should be Unicode's job to assign meaning to characters, so I don't know why ∑ ("U+2211 N-Ary Summation") exists.

> I don't know why [it] exists. Ill-considered backward 'compatibility' with block-drawing character sets for mathematical typesetting. (Fucked if I know which character set, but presumably the same one they found U+23B2 '⎲' and U+23B3 '⎳' in.)

Pretty sure those are necessary with the extenders when you want to sum larger things like integrals. Can't remember the details, though.

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

#253

Post by michaelmrose » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 12:08 AM UTC

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.

Here is something else neat

https://github.com/jeremija/unipicker

Can be run with --command="rofi -dmenu" to filter via rofi and piped to xdotool type to insert immediately

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

#254

Post by lowbloodsugar » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 12:15 AM UTC

astrange wrote: post #226

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is horrendous. In the forty years since BCPL (go was 2008?) the best way we could coordinate groups of developers in developing applications is to type streams of ASCII text and save them on disk with 0x0A indicating "the human wants a new line here". FML. Imagine if, to change the graph of your Facebook feed, you had to checkout myname.person, add "friend Bob { ... }", and then try to commit it. But far more c…

https://wiki.c2.com/?WorseIsBetter Your image computing system isn't better than text files, much like your online file storage system isn't better than emailing things to yourself.

So we shouldn't have invented the database?

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

#255

Post by fomine3 » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 12:36 AM UTC

bckr wrote: post #198

voldacar wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, so we need better keyboards then. If a character is annoying to type, that is a keyboard problem, not a language or charset problem. So let's improve the keyboard. Currently we are stuck with the garbage qwerty keyboard (and various slightly better permutations of it) which doesn't even let you type all of ascii. Computers should just do what humans want. If you see a character, you should just be able to type…

> If you see a character, you should just be able to type it. How should we do this? I am imagining that we have a "char-bank" that lives on a little touch display at the left of my keyboard. I can add chars to my bank by highlighting them and pressing a 'yank' key. I can scroll up and down through my charbank and type the chars with a tap or rearrange them with touch-and-hold similarly to apps on a phone's homepage.…

You can see IMEs used for Chinese/Japanese. Type in ascii keyboard, then transform to own language characters.

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

#256

Post by bradrn » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 1:29 AM UTC

toomanyducks wrote: post #172

bradrn wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we could intergrate with keyboards, we'd definitely take advantage of it. From my own personal experience this is extremely true. A while back I made myself a custom keyboard [0] which can enter lots of characters, mostly for linguistic tasks. I didn’t intend to start using it for things outside linguistics, but before long I was using it everywhere — and my inventory of available characters expanded correspondi…

If I see a character I can't enter in someone's code, I think I'll run away. It's cool and all for your code, but sooner or later someone else is going to have to deal with it.

I agree, which is why I avoid Unicode for anything someone else will need to type in, or at least give ASCII alternatives when possible. I use it mainly for things like local variable and parameter names.

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

#257

Post by vajrabum » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 2:13 AM UTC

Most of that makes sense but it's worth remembering the ASR-33 was upper case only!

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

#258

Post by astrange » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 2:47 AM UTC

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #254

astrange wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://wiki.c2.com/?WorseIsBetter Your image computing system isn't better than text files, much like your online file storage system isn't better than emailing things to yourself.

So we shouldn't have invented the database?

I would say sqlite contains much of the wisdom of flat files and other databases often don't.

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

#259

Post by drpixie » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 3:07 AM UTC

phkamp wrote: post #140

I wrote this, and I'm here if you have questions.

I'd love to use unicode on a current project - but just the unicode library is bigger than the memory of the small computer being used :(

Seriously, unicode is appallingly messy and heavy-weight. With all that code-point space to burn, a rational design would be very different to what we've got.

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

#260

Post by arp242 » Mon, Jun 28, 2021, 3:48 AM UTC

aniou wrote: post #64

arp242 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use the compose key a lot; when writing docs I tend to use → instead of ->, I use – instead of -, etc. I have an extensive XCompose set up for all this, and I find it very convenient. But it's still three keystrokes instead of one. I wouldn't really look forward to using × instead of *, ÷ instead of /, etc. all the time, even though I can type them here with relative ease the hassle increases the more you use it (I…

BTW: there is another obstacle aside from typing issues: readability problems and similarities between operators and ordinary characters with computer fonts. In case of manually written math equations (or LaTeX-ones) operators are easy distinguishable from arguments. They have a different sizes too. For example, "result = axe" and "result = a×e" in many cases looks the same and, even in my browser, with font larger,…

I would imagine that tooling such as syntax highlighting and decent errors should alleviate that sufficiently to not be a serious practical problem.

But yeah, I read over the "axe" and "a×e" difference on my first read (and I browse HN at quite a large zoom by default, not because of vision issues, I just like larger text as a matter of personal preference).

Either way, I don't really see the significant advantages in the first place. In spite of the article and some of the strong words of some in this thread ("horrendous", "embarrassing", etc.), I don't see the problem is with just sticking to ASCII. The only case I've seen is where it would have been nice is when «T» was briefly considered for Go generics instead of (later changed to [T]) to avoid overloading the existing meanings of and []. I actually would have liked that. But / vs ÷? shrug.