171–180 of 189 posts
For everyone who doesn't need ä,ü,ö. Or software that needs to take ä,ü,ö. For everyone else, UTF is a blessing.
Which, given the people who designed this and the time they were designing for, was most of them (and most of their audience). Don't confuse "this old standard doesn't adequately cover all cases today" with "this old standard sucked at the time".
For everyone who doesn't need ä,ü,ö. Or software that needs to take ä,ü,ö. For everyone else, UTF is a blessing.
> For everyone else, UTF is a blessing. Except people who want to use Japanese and not have it render weirdly, something that was easy in any internationalised software that used the traditional codepage system, but is practically impossible in Unicode-based software.
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just... this is why this forum exists. thank you
you're welcome. i'll try to remember your comment the next time someone replies to me with something like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40993821 or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40993328 or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40992456
Too bad we now have Unicode, an elegant castle covered with ugly graffiti and ramshackle addons. For example: 1. normalization 2. backwards running text (hey, why not add spiral running text?) 3. fonts 4. invisible characters 5. multiple code points with the same glyph 6. glyphs defined by multiple code points (gee, I thought Unicode was to get away with that mess from code pages!) 7. made up languages (Elvish? Come…
10. code points where the appropriate glyph depends on the language (CJK unification)
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No I don't -I live in a different universe to you: % (uname; cd /usr/ports; ls -d */ascii) FreeBSD zsh: no matches found: */ascii % which ascii ascii not found % It's the same on OSX and debian by default doesn't install that command. If you live inside a POSIX/IEEE 1003 system and want to know the ascii table reliably then the command I run is the one which works. If your distribution doesn't ship manuals by default…
”man ascii” has as much guarantee to work on a POSIX system as a command called ”ascii” seeing neither (specifically a man page called ”ascii”) are part of the standard. So you will either get command not found, or man page not found.
The man page comes preinstalled on most modern non-embedded POSIX systems. The command does not.
For everyone who doesn't need ä,ü,ö. Or software that needs to take ä,ü,ö. For everyone else, UTF is a blessing.
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There's a semantic difference between "accented letter" and "different letter that happens to visually look like another language's accented letter". "Ą" in polish is not "A" with some accent. And the idea behind unicode was to preserve human written text, including keeping track of things like "this is letter A1 with an accent, but this is letter A2 that looks visually similar to A1 with accent but is different sema…
But it is precisely "a with some accent", you just have two ways to encode it for
There are writing systems where combining accents are used to represent just variation on a letter. Use of combining characters for "Ą" (and "Ć" and "Ł" and many other so-called "polish letters") is, at best, a historical artefact of trying to write them in deficient encodings.
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But it is precisely "a with some accent", you just have two ways to encode it for
"Ą" is a separate letter in polish alfabet, not an accented variant of "A". There are writing systems where combining accents are used to represent just variation on a letter. Use of combining characters for "Ą" (and "Ć" and "Ł" and many other so-called "polish letters") is, at best, a historical artefact of trying to write them in deficient encodings.
There is no semantic difference, just an encoding one, the end result looks the same and means the same thing (well, to a point, it still depends on the context - like what language you mean - but within the same context it's the same thing and there are even Unicode rules to treat it the same like in search etc.)
And precomposed is just the same historical deficiency - you could've just as well designed a more compact encoding with no precomposed letters, only combinations
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I thought the point of that was that a single bitflip makes an uppercase lower, or vice versa...
It can't be "the" point, because AaBbCc would also let you use a single bit to control case, the bottom bit.