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Subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language

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Re: Subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language

#171

Post by smt88 »

saurik wrote: post #96
smt88 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, there are literally billions of people in African, Asian, and Middle Eastern cultures for whom photos of bare boobs are also taboo, so this seems like a case of just having to deal with being a minority in a public square.

Are you asserting that those billions of people who also aren't getting their way (as all decisions are made by Americans, whom are not at all numerous either offline or online) are a minority?

I'm asserting that multinational corporations typically aim for the lowest common denominator. For boobs, that's to avoid showing them.

Re: Subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language

#172

Post by cubefox »

crazygringo wrote: post #170
WalterBright wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also ASCII. How many characters can you fit into 7 bits? Compromises get made.

Indeed. In hindsight, the tilde (~), backtick (`) and caret (^) turned out to be useless for their original purposes in ASCII -- they'd been used on typewriters to overprint accents, but you couldn't overprint on a computer screen. Same with the underscore (_) to underline. While the backslash (\) was a truly strange mark that IBM included for "reverse division", apparently to support ALGOL logical operations ("\/" a…

I think even underscore and backslash weren't necessary in computing, even though they were put to use once they were there. The @ was also really not necessary. And a lot of those invisible characters weren't either. We should have had just one line break character, since the distinction between CR and LF makes no sense for computers, and certainly caused a lot of incompatibility. As you said, hindsight...

Re: Subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language

#173

Post by WalterBright »

cubefox wrote: post #172
crazygringo wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. In hindsight, the tilde (~), backtick (`) and caret (^) turned out to be useless for their original purposes in ASCII -- they'd been used on typewriters to overprint accents, but you couldn't overprint on a computer screen. Same with the underscore (_) to underline. While the backslash (\) was a truly strange mark that IBM included for "reverse division", apparently to support ALGOL logical operations ("\/" a…

I think even underscore and backslash weren't necessary in computing, even though they were put to use once they were there. The @ was also really not necessary. And a lot of those invisible characters weren't either. We should have had just one line break character, since the distinction between CR and LF makes no sense for computers, and certainly caused a lot of incompatibility. As you said, hindsight...

CR and LF made sense for mechanical printers.

LF was used a lot for glass editors connected at low baud rates.

Re: Subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language

#174

Post by cratermoon »

mcpackieh wrote: post #151
cratermoon wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strings are a primitive type. Names are not strings in the same way Dates are not strings. They can be implemented, represented, and printed as strings, but they have behaviors and meaning that the primitive string type does not. To use another example, a binary tree is not an array, although it can be implemented using an array. Money is not a floating point value, and woe to the programmer that tries to use float f…

There are international standards for representing dates, but none exist for names. Names do not abide by any scheme or set of rules, therefore the only appropriate data structure for storing names is a unicode string. Anything else will exclude people.

Point me to the international standards for representing money.

Re: Subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language

#175

Post by eesmith »

tomrod wrote: post #155
eesmith wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 24-hour time, those are 12-24 and 0-12, respectively. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 A place open 24 hours/day is open in the period 0-24.

I don't follow your point. Are you correcting my point on clopen intervals and mod bases?

I think clopen is too complicated in that it expresses ranges that are not practically useful, like (10,11], and it complicates expressing something like "Open 0-24", where your notation appears to require a date.

I think you get the essential utility you want in a 24 hour clock by simply letting 24 (or "24:00:00" when fully written out) be a way to represent the end of the day.

It's also already in use, with examples at https://ioi2023.hu/faq/ , http://www.garageferrarimilazzo.com/en/ , and https://jozsefvaros.hu/english/news-in-the-district/2022/12/... .

Re: Subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language

#176

Post by cratermoon »

cubefox wrote: post #160
cratermoon wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ISO (please fill me up on the number) 8601 https://www.iso.org/iso-8601-date-and-time-format.html Speaking of dates, if you live in the US did you remember to move your clocks back an hour last night? If you live in Europe, it's next week.

In Europe it was last week.

My bad. I knew it wasn't the same as the US, making scheduling across time zones even more of a pain than usual.

Re: Subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language

#177

Post by SushiHippie »

cubefox wrote: post #153
cratermoon wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Other than in English-speaking countries and some Spanish-speaking countries, the terms a.m. and p.m. are seldom used and often unknown. I did not know that. The terms are from the Latin ante meridiem and post meridiem (meridiem, midday, ante before, post after) so it seemed logical to me that any Romance language would have them. But then, English is not a Romance language (but borrowed heavily from them) so, cha…

Other languages write e.g. 6:00 instead of 6:00 am, and 18:00 instead of 6:00 pm. When you talk about analog clocks you can presumably say something like "it shows six o'clock in the afternoon". (What's the opposite of afternoon by the way? Morning? But isn't that the opposite of evening? Or just ante meridiem? But that's Latin.)

In german there is "Vormittag" and "Nachmittag". Vormittag is the time between the morning and noon. Nachmittag is the time between noon and the evening.

Mittag = noon Vor = before -> "beforenoon" (literal translation of Vormittag) Nach = after -> "afternoon" (literal translation of Nachmittag)

But "vormittag" just translates to "morning" (with deepL and google translate).

Though there seems to exist "forenoon".

Re: Subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language

#178

Post by pornel »

There are two cases in Polish where inaccurate translations in Windows have changed the Polish language.

Font has been translated as "czcionka", which in Polish originally meant sort (a metal block for a single letter).

Cancel has been translated as "anuluj" (to revoke, abolish).

This happened at the time when computers have exploded in popularity in Poland, and the terms have been assimilated along with all other computer jargon. Later attempts to correct the translations ("krój pisma", "poniechaj") have failed due to sounding like a pedantic deviation from an already established terminology. So Polish message boxes have [OK] and [Abolish] buttons.

Re: Subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language

#179

Post by TRiG_Ireland »

mcpackieh wrote: post #79
chrismorgan wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A funny/sad aspect of it is that I get the impression that violation of the /^(? \S+) (? \S+) (? \S+)$/ custom isn’t even all that rare in the USA because it’s still moderately common to reuse names and add ordinals, a practice which has largely fallen out of practice in other English-first countries (so that violation of the convention has become rarer in them, though certainly there are other deviations—e.g. I have…

I also know Americans who go by their middle names because everybody in the family has the same first name, with the first name turned into an initial before their middle name. Usually software can handle this by entering "J Bob" in the first name field, but not always. Sometimes software asks for first name and middle name separately, and then you know you're going to have trouble because another system thinks "J Bo…

The main problem with the single field idea is alphabetisation.

Re: Subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language

#180

Post by TRiG_Ireland »

josephg wrote: post #61
mikepurvis wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related to that is all the angst about how Sim City basically just lets you make car-centric hellscapes, not at all unlike San Jose, the city in which it was birthed. And City Skylines inherited a lot of that legacy, that designs centered around mass transit and cycling (such as one would find in Europe or Japan) really only become fully practical with a bunch of mods installed.

I visited Amsterdam recently and instantly noticed something weird about the road layouts there. I did some research - they differentiate between streets (meant for short distances, or getting to a local destination) and roads (meant for long distance travel - or driving past a location). As a visitor, it seems brilliant. And it makes way more sense than what a lot of roads look like here - with cyclists trying to fi…

Urban planners have coined the word "stroad" for the hybrid monstrosities.
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