6 ms·
How exactly is Latin-1 privileged in this regard? Note its suffix - writing this from a region where other single-byte encodings proliferated in the 1990s, befo
by Piskvorrr 8y ago
How exactly is Latin-1 privileged in this regard? Note its suffix - writing this from a region where other single-byte encodings proliferated in the 1990s, before sort-of settling to Latin-2 and/or Windows-1250 in the aughts (no, they're not the same, and the mapping is subtly broken).
If you mean "ASCII was good for our grandfathers", say so - but don't pretend that Latin-n somehow was not a bastardized set of hacks extended upon ASCII (like all "regional" encodings, single-byte or not), and shouldn't have died at least a decade ago: suddenly a wild Latin-10 string appears, and you're down to spinning up a conversion engine, praying that something didn't slip through the cracks (and inevitably something does, eventually). If your data never crosses a process boundary - by all means, keep it in Linear B, see if I care. Caveat: maintenance of your back-and-forth conversion engine will eat you alive, or iconv will obliterate the benefits of the "enormous" savings. (I also had the great idea "we'll just use a clever(tm) scheme and only have the necessary encoding parts," sometime around 2005: Memory and processing speed improvement was marginal, burden to keep juggling One Special Encoding (Latin-2 in my case) was not.)
- bradleyjg 8y ago> How exactly is Latin-1 privileged in this regard? Latin-1 is sufficient for languages which countries representing more than 50% of global GDP speak. It might not be fair but I’m not sure this is a question of fairness to begin with.
- Piskvorrr 8y agoOh. In that case, you do mean ASCII, methinks (which also works), with Latin-1 you're shooting yourself in both feet. (Looks for link to "falsehoods programmers believe about encodings")
- gpvos 8y agoNot really if you can make a good living writing software for only the US/UK, France, Germany, Italy and a few more Western European countries, which is perfectly feasible. Latin1 works perfectly fine there, and if you wanted, and you didn't have to interact too much with other systems, you could just completely ignore all other encodings until UTF-8 started to get traction in the later 1990s. It even got into many RFCs as the default encoding until the RFC editors started to enforce everyone to implement UTF-8 and default to it.
- Piskvorrr 8y agoOh, you could have done that in 1990s and well into the aughts, no doubt about that - that's exactly what happened :) I thought you proposed Latin-1 as useful today.
- gpvos 8y agoOh no, no way. I'm not 100% sure about bradleyjg though... Maybe I misunderstood them.
- bradleyjg 8y agoI think Latin-1 compatible strings are common enough to be worth optimizing for with separate code paths. At least in large projects like OSes and programming languages. That doesn’t mean I think Unicode support should be omitted.
- gpvos 8y agoIn such cases I would think the optimization is basically for ASCII, and then extend that to Latin1 because it happens to be the first 256 characters of Unicode, which means processing is trivial and you don't waste the other 128 byte values that way. But I figure that 99.9% of those strings would be ASCII-only.
- chc 8y agoTo my understanding, ASCII basically only covers English and Italian well, whereas Latin-1 covers most Western European languages — which includes the main languages of the Americas (Spanish, English, French, Portuguese).
- zeveb 8y ago> To my understanding, ASCII basically only covers English and Italian well And German, too: while German does have ä, ö, ü & ß, they may correctly be written as ae, oe, ue & ss.
- ithkuil 8y agoItalian requires è, ù, ò, à, ì, é, ó, í and (rarely used) î Accented letters just don't appear that much prominently as in French or Spanish, and distinctions of acute and grave accents are often nowadays lost even on native writers if it wasn't for spellcheckers.
- gpvos 8y ago> with Latin-1 you're shooting yourself in both feet Can you be more specific about that? As I wrote in a sibling comment, I'm not convinced. I mean, nowadays you shouldn't use any of the ISO-8859-* encodings anymore of course, but we're talking about the 1990s here.
- kilburn 8y agoI beg to differ, considering that it doesn't contain the € sign.
- Piskvorrr 8y agoThe list of what it doesn't contain, with a 256 character space, is...long ;)