Look, the point about the two digits for a year is well

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Post #198,621

by jake123

3/14/05 6:09:09 PM

Look, the point about the two digits for a year is well

taken, but the point about ascii is not. It was supposed to be a standard that could be used by anybody, but ended up only being really usable by people who speak and use only English. The idea that they only expected americans to use it is easily debunked by reading any of the literature extant at the time... what they did expect is that only americans would program it.

--\n-------------------------------------------------------------------\n* Jack Troughton                            jake at consultron.ca *\n* [link|http://consultron.ca|http://consultron.ca]                   [link|irc://irc.ecomstation.ca|irc://irc.ecomstation.ca] *\n* Kingston Ontario Canada               [link|news://news.consultron.ca|news://news.consultron.ca] *\n-------------------------------------------------------------------

Post #200,492

by jb4

3/25/05 2:15:41 PM

Disagree

ASCII was supposed to be a standard for American Information Interchange (as pointed out above), hence the name. And being first it followed the now-increasingly-popular YAGNI rule.

Hey, I didn't notice that IBM (International Business Machines) fixed the problem with its highly vaunted and hopelessly idiotic EBCDIC, either.

When ASCII became problematic due to its limitations, it was extended (in the best style of Micros~1); now we have UNICODE, and a whole raft of ISO 8859's. And then there are the Asians: JIS, Shift-JIS, GB2232, GB18030, Big 5 et al. So now you can have your \ufffd in any one of several dozen encoding schemes. Ain't choice grand?

jb4
shrub\ufffdbish (Am., from shrub + rubbish, after the derisive name for America's 43 president; 2003) n. 1. a form of nonsensical political doubletalk wherein the speaker attempts to defend the indefensible by lying, obfuscation, or otherwise misstating the facts; GIBBERISH. 2. any of a collection of utterances from America's putative 43rd president. cf. BULLSHIT

What the heck is text? - (systems) - (56) - March 12, 2005, 11:48:38 AM EST

It depends on the context. - (Another Scott) - (2) - March 12, 2005, 12:23:39 PM EST

Unicode and ASCII - (StevenYap) - (1) - March 12, 2005, 06:54:00 PM EST

Re: Unicode and ASCII - Nitpick II - (jb4) - March 25, 2005, 01:40:46 PM EST

you are confusing text with display - (boxley) - (12) - March 12, 2005, 06:53:13 PM EST

Uhhh..Not quite, Bill - (jb4) - (11) - March 25, 2005, 01:50:46 PM EST

And that is one thing that sucks about Unicode - (ben_tilly) - (9) - March 25, 2005, 03:09:44 PM EST

At least they're consistent - (jb4) - (8) - March 25, 2005, 06:02:42 PM EST

But it is a problem - (ben_tilly) - March 25, 2005, 06:13:17 PM EST

Except for that full width/half width ascii thing - (tuberculosis) - (5) - March 27, 2005, 09:40:24 PM EST

I dunno... - (jb4) - March 28, 2005, 12:11:15 PM EST

My personal take on it - (jake123) - (3) - March 28, 2005, 12:15:20 PM EST

Perhaps, but it makes searching tricky - (tuberculosis) - (2) - March 28, 2005, 02:49:36 PM EST

Well, if it was an easy problem - (jake123) - March 28, 2005, 03:29:43 PM EST

ICLRPD (new thread) - (jb4) - March 29, 2005, 07:57:14 PM EST

Have you all seen the HUGE unicode poster? - (FuManChu) - March 28, 2005, 04:33:12 PM EST

close enough to debug a table entry :-) - (boxley) - March 26, 2005, 09:26:51 AM EST

Text is not as simple as it seems - (ben_tilly) - March 12, 2005, 11:00:34 PM EST

This is one thing that Java handles pretty well - (bluke) - March 13, 2005, 11:35:09 AM EST

Rule #1 - Everything you think you know is wrong - (tuberculosis) - (29) - Aug. 21, 2007, 06:28:08 AM EDT

Why xenophobic? - (drewk) - (28) - March 14, 2005, 10:44:16 AM EST

Because they didn't think... - (pwhysall) - March 14, 2005, 11:24:31 AM EST

Because if they had spent any time at all - (tuberculosis) - (25) - Aug. 21, 2007, 06:30:01 AM EDT

Now how about addressing my example - (drewk) - (17) - March 14, 2005, 12:13:47 PM EST

The best explanation that I've seen of why 2 digits... - (ben_tilly) - March 14, 2005, 12:46:32 PM EST

No, but they were xenophobic etc - (jake123) - (15) - March 14, 2005, 02:50:01 PM EST

xenophobic's probably the wrong word - (SpiceWare) - (14) - March 14, 2005, 04:12:18 PM EST

Yeah, you're right - (jake123) - (13) - March 14, 2005, 05:02:32 PM EST

How about "escessively humble"? - (drewk) - (4) - March 14, 2005, 05:35:25 PM EST

Look, the point about the two digits for a year is well - (jake123) - (1) - March 14, 2005, 06:09:09 PM EST

Disagree - (jb4) - March 25, 2005, 02:15:41 PM EST

Maybe... - (tuberculosis) - (1) - Aug. 21, 2007, 06:31:43 AM EDT

How about simply "provincial". - (a6l6e6x) - March 14, 2005, 08:02:42 PM EST

The people who coded for teletypes and green terminals - (Arkadiy) - (7) - March 14, 2005, 05:37:55 PM EST

Yes, a typographer - (jake123) - (3) - March 14, 2005, 06:10:49 PM EST

Internationalization would not have been so easy - (ben_tilly) - March 14, 2005, 07:23:05 PM EST

Text layout in 80 by 24 grid of monspaced font? - (Arkadiy) - (1) - March 14, 2005, 07:59:49 PM EST

Phone books back then - (jake123) - March 15, 2005, 11:18:10 AM EST

Please don't use the letter "e" in your code. - (pwhysall) - (2) - March 14, 2005, 06:20:45 PM EST

I certainly used to do without "e" - (Arkadiy) - March 14, 2005, 08:01:39 PM EST

I couldn't use "e" either ... - (JimWeirich) - March 15, 2005, 05:52:09 PM EST

Oh, come ON already - (jb4) - (6) - March 25, 2005, 02:20:51 PM EST

The C++ standard i18n library is awful - (tuberculosis) - (5) - March 27, 2005, 09:56:44 PM EST

Dont know ICU - (jb4) - (4) - March 28, 2005, 12:13:20 PM EST

ICLRPD (new thread) - (drewk) - March 28, 2005, 12:33:42 PM EST

You can find it here - (tuberculosis) - (2) - March 28, 2005, 02:44:08 PM EST

Time line? - (jb4) - (1) - March 29, 2005, 07:59:43 PM EST

Released in 1988 - (tuberculosis) - March 29, 2005, 08:07:25 PM EST

Actually, Algol 68 was designed from the ground up - (Arkadiy) - March 14, 2005, 12:16:18 PM EST

Re: What the heck is text? - (JayMehaffey) - (3) - March 14, 2005, 10:51:50 AM EST

I must correct you - ASCII is a 7-bit encoding - (tuberculosis) - Aug. 21, 2007, 06:30:04 AM EDT

Whoa, there. - (ubernostrum) - (1) - March 14, 2005, 01:31:43 PM EST

Your right mostly - (JayMehaffey) - March 14, 2005, 02:36:05 PM EST

Using a pencil, it's unambiguous. -NT - (mmoffitt) - (3) - March 28, 2005, 01:14:03 PM EST

You haven't seen my handwriting.... -NT - (Another Scott) - (2) - March 28, 2005, 02:04:44 PM EST

Uh-oh. I wouldn't confess that ;0) - (mmoffitt) - (1) - March 28, 2005, 02:56:59 PM EST

My father's handwriting was so bad... - (broomberg) - March 28, 2005, 09:21:00 PM EST

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