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[Luna]

On Thursday, 20 August 2026 at 00:01:10 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 8/19/2026 2:25 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>> And that is where things go wrong.  Upper/lowercasing via 
>> arithmetic
>> works only for simplistic languages like English.  Other 
>> languages
>> require much more sophisticated algorithms (yes, algorithms) 
>> to do it
>> correctly.  And if you're already doing that, having implicit 
>> casting or
>> explicit is no longer a deciding factor.
>
> Since you don't like the casing example, consider 
> string-to-decimal and decimal-to-string conversions.
>
> P.S. I suspect the "simplistic" English is the result of 1) the 
> explosive use of the printing press and 2) morse code and 3) 
> the RADIX50 character set. These were all powerful pressures to 
> simplify the written characters.

Other countries with less simplistic type systems had their own 
printing press evolution and had to develop alternatives to 
things such as morse code. Hell Windows sucks at multilingual use 
due to the fact that it’s still stuck in pre-Unicode semantics 
under the hood where each country and language had their own text 
encoding.

Which is why if you get a text document from Iceland it may be 
misinterpreted as Danish and lead to gibberish text, due to text 
frequency analysis that windows does being flawed. Japan still 
clings on to Shift-JIS text encoding in many places which is a 
fixed-width 16-bit encoding that is incompatible with ASCII and 
Unicode. Simply because it can represent some things better than 
the alternatives.

So no, it’s more a side effect of US and UK inventors seeing 
themselves as the center of the world and leaving the rest of us 
to clean up the mess they made.