4 ms·
Are you talking about how, when someone is limited to ASCII, he makes substitutions he wouldn't make if he were using Unicode? Such as using :-) instead of U+26
by emddudley 11y ago
Are you talking about how, when someone is limited to ASCII, he makes substitutions he wouldn't make if he were using Unicode? Such as using :-) instead of U+263A?
Or are you maybe talking at a software level, where you can make some simplifications and assumptions about a string when it is guaranteed to be ASCII?
Because otherwise I can't see how there could be any semantic or meaningful difference between ASCII and Unicode when the text is the same. An ASCII 'a' has exactly the same meaning as a Unicode 'Latin Small Letter A'.
- jstimpfle 11y agoYou can look at it from an information theoretic standpoint. The information you get from the string is also all the things that it does not contain. Btw. I have no clue why I am constantly downvoted. Whoever did this, I don't think there is an incentive to downvote my two ancestor comments. It's demotivating.
- coldtea 11y agoDidn't downvote but I can see why they got downvoted: they make a claim, but when asked for a specific argument, they go roundabout. In what SPECIFIC way is an only-ascii string not a UTF-8 string for ALL intends and purposes? You throw some words like "semantics" but no actual arguments.
- jstimpfle 11y agoI think I answered that in the clearest way I (personally) could, right in the comment to which you replied.