3 ms·

Oh. 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

Oh. 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 ago
Not 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 ago
  Oh, 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 ago
    Oh no, no way. I'm not 100% sure about bradleyjg though... Maybe I misunderstood them.
    - bradleyjg 8y ago
      I 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 ago
        In 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 ago
To 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 ago
  Italian 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.

Oh. 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 ago

Not 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 ago
Oh, 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 ago
  Oh no, no way. I'm not 100% sure about bradleyjg though... Maybe I misunderstood them.
  - bradleyjg 8y ago
    I 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 ago
      In 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 ago

To 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 ago
Italian 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.