[OT] The Case Against... Unicode?
Patrick Schluter via Digitalmars-d
digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Wed Jun 1 09:15:15 PDT 2016
On Wednesday, 1 June 2016 at 15:02:33 UTC, Wyatt wrote:
> On Wednesday, 1 June 2016 at 13:57:27 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>>
>> No, I explicitly said not the web in a subsequent post. The
>> ignorance here of what 2G speeds are like is mind-boggling.
>>
> It's not hard. I think a lot of us remember when a 14.4 modem
> was cutting-edge. Codepages and incompatible encodings were
> terrible then, too.
>
> Never again.
>
>> Well, when you _like_ a ludicrous encoding like UTF-8, not
>> sure your opinion matters.
>
> It _is_ kind of ludicrous, isn't it? But it really is the
> least-bad option for the most text. Sorry, bub.
>
>>> No. The common string-handling use case is code that is
>>> unaware which script (not language, btw) your text is in.
>>
>> Lol, this may be the dumbest argument put forth yet.
>
> This just makes it feel like you're trolling. You're not just
> trolling, right?
>
>> I don't think anyone here even understands what a good
>> encoding is and what it's for, which is why there's no point
>> in debating this.
>
> And I don't think you realise how backwards you sound to people
> who had to live through the character encoding hell of the
> past. This has been an ongoing headache for the better part of
> a century (it still comes up in old files, sites, and systems)
> and you're literally the only person I've ever seen seriously
> suggest we turn back now that the madness has been somewhat
> tamed.
Indeed, Joakim's proposal is so insane it beggars belief (why not
go back to baudot encoding, it's only 5 bit, hurray, it's so much
faster when used with flag semaphores).
As a programmer in the European Commission translation unit,
working on the probably biggest translation memory in the world
for 14 years, I can attest that Unicode is a blessing. When I
remember the shit we had in our documents because of the code
pages before most programs could handle utf-8 or utf-16 (and
before 2004 we only had 2 alphabets to take care of, Western and
Greek). What Joakim does not understand, is that there are huge,
huge quantities of documents that are multi-lingual. Translators
of course handle nearly exclusively with at least bi-lingual
documents. Any document encountered by a translator must at least
be able to present the source and the target language. But even
outside of that specific population, multilingual documents are
very, very common.
>
> If you have to deal with delivering the fastest possible i18n
> at GSM data rates, well, that's a tough problem and it sounds
> like you might need to do something pretty special. Turning the
> entire ecosystem into your special case is not the answer.
>
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