Python usage numbers
Roy Smith
roy at panix.com
Sun Feb 12 10:48:36 EST 2012
In article <4f375347$0$29986$c3e8da3$5496439d at news.astraweb.com>,
Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:
> ASCII truly is a blight on the world, and the sooner it fades into
> obscurity, like EBCDIC, the better.
That's a fair statement, but it's also fair to say that at the time it
came out (49 years ago!) it was a revolutionary improvement on the
extant state of affairs (every manufacturer inventing their own code,
and often different codes for different machines). Given the cost of
both computer memory and CPU cycles at the time, sticking to a 7-bit
code (the 8th bit was for parity) was a necessary evil.
As Steven D'Aprano pointed out, it was missing some commonly used US
symbols such as ¢ or ©. This was a small price to pay for the
simplicity ASCII afforded. It wasn't a bad encoding. I was a very good
encoding. But the world has moved on and computing hardware has become
cheap enough that supporting richer encodings and character sets is
realistic.
And, before people complain about the character set being US-Centric,
keep in mind that the A in ASCII stands for American, and it was
published by ANSI (whose A also stands for American). I'm not trying to
wave the flag here, just pointing out that it was never intended to be
anything other than a national character set.
Part of the complexity of Unicode is that when people switch from
working with ASCII to working with Unicode, they're really having to
master two distinct things at the same time (and often conflate them
into a single confusing mess). One is the Unicode character set. The
other is a specific encoding (UTF-8, UTF-16, etc). Not to mention silly
things like BOM (Byte Order Mark). I expect that some day, storage
costs will become so cheap that we'll all just be using UTF-32, and
programmers of the day will wonder how their poor parents and
grandparents ever managed in a world where nobody quite knew what you
meant when you asked, "how long is that string?".
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