Cult-like behaviour [was Re: Kindness]
Jim Lee
jlee54 at gmail.com
Sun Jul 15 21:02:51 EDT 2018
On 07/15/18 17:17, MRAB wrote:
> On 2018-07-16 00:10, Jim Lee wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 07/15/18 16:04, Chris Angelico wrote:
>>>
>>> You claimed that Unicode was insignificant to many programs. I'm
>>> trying to say that a Unicode text string is a vital part of any
>>> program that works with text, which is pretty much anything that talks
>>> to humans. You keep saying that ... well you keep saying different
>>> things, and I've lost track of what your point actually is, but you
>>> want a way to... disable Unicode? Or something? And you have yet to
>>> give any example of a program that doesn't need Unicode, but still
>>> uses text.
>>>
>>> ChrisA
>>
>> Why does this seem so obtuse to you?
>>
>> Have you never heard of programming BEFORE Unicode existed?
>>
>> How ever did we get along? It must have been a hallucination...
>>
> It wasn't a hallucination, but it was annoying having to deal with
> code pages.
Yes, it was. However, dealing with Unicode is also annoying. If there
were only one encoding, such as UTF-8, I wouldn't mind so much.
>
> The UK had a version of ASCII that had £ instead of #, France had a
> version that had both that and ç instead of some character, etc, and,
> more than once, someone has posted here code that has ¥ instead of \.
>
> Someone on the Auxlang list used to complain about the alphabet used
> by Esperanto because of some of its letters. He was eventually
> persuaded to try switching to Unicode and UTF-8. He reported that the
> switch was a lot easier than he'd expected (because, as had been
> pointed out, any decent software he was using would already support
> Unicode, or, if it didn't, there would be an alternative that did).
> After the switch, he didn't see those letters as a problem any more!
But I don't speak Esperanto, and my programs don't generally care what
characters are used for European currencies. When I create a simple
program that takes a text file (created by me) and munges it into a
different format, I don't care if someone from Uzbekistan can read it or
not. When I create a one-time use program to visualize some data on a
graph, I don't care if anyone else can read the axis labels but me.
These are realities. A good programming language will allow for these
realities without putting the burden on the programmer to turn *every*
program into a politically correct, globalization compliant model of
modern groupthink.
-Jim
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