3 ms·

I suggested some falsehoods that programmers believe about telephones a while back (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19215636 https://news.ycombinator.com/i

by JdeBP 8y ago

I suggested some falsehoods that programmers believe about telephones a while back (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19215636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19215636). There is a case for falsehoods that programmers believe about ASCII, starting with: * It's 8-bit. (It's 7-bit.) * It is sufficient for English. (Ð ð Þ þ) * It is sufficient for Modern English. (zoölogy coöperate £ née resumé) * It at least has everything that one could type on a typewriter. (½ ¼ ¢ , and that's just starting with some contemporary 20th century U.S. typewriters from IBM such as the Selectric) * It is sufficient for the U.S., at least. (Not for the U.S. Library of Congress in 1969 it wasn't. It needed 174 characters for catalogue cards, per https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF02404378 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF02404378 .) * It was used by Multics. (Multics used a modified version, padded out with leading zero bits and replacing DEL with PAD. See http://web.mit.edu/saltzer/www/publications/multics/bc-2-01.pdf http://web.mit.edu/saltzer/www/publications/multics/bc-2-01.... .) * It does not have broken vertical bar. (It was in the 1968 standard at 124, a broken bar because the PL/I language people did not want their unbroken vertical bar to be in the then "national variant" range. https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html/L7rD197ldIw/RdAbL31DjAwJ https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.infosystems.www.authori... http://jkorpela.fi/latin1/ascii-hist.html#7C http://jkorpela.fi/latin1/ascii-hist.html#7C ) * It does have broken vertical bar. (It was replaced in the 1977 standard by an unbroken vertical bar at 124. Then some subsequent 8-bit character sets in the 1980s re-introduced a broken vertical bar in a second position, with much ensuing hilarity.) * It did not have arrows. (In the original standard ↑ and ← were where ^ and _ now are, for some consequences of which see https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/9201/1932 https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/a/9201/1932 .) * It is the same as ECMA-6. (ECMA-6:1991 allows national-language variants in several code positions. The standard ASCII characters in those positions are merely the "International Reference Version" and one possibility from amongst several in ECMA-6. See https://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-006.htm https://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ec... .)

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
So in actual fact English was adapted to the medium, albeit minimally.
- fao_ 8y ago
  The end result of adapting our language to the medium is to lose in expressibility and gain in portability. Forcing technology to catch up is a more coherent option in the long run
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    That's the exact same trade off we made for writing in the first place. Yet here we are still conversing with text despite the technology to record and send each other video having been widely available for a decade or more.
    - fao_ 8y ago
      That's specious reasoning. If you mean, body language is the main or majority channel for communication, well, how much body lanuage matters to communication is contested and differs based on context anyway (see: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/beyond-words/201109/is-nonverbal-communication-numbers-game https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/beyond-words/201109/...). If you mean, there is a loss of expressibility going from the spoken word to the written word. Is there? You would have to prove that that loss is as significant as the symbolic/representational destruction you are advocating. Much of the imperfect synonyms we have developed in english are used to signal tone and intent -- things that are usually signalled in body language. So, just because we are using the written word does not mean we cannot express those things. You have something in a larger space, you can represent it in a smaller space using longer and more complex series of glyphs. > Yet here we are still conversing with text despite the technology to record and send each other video having been widely available for a decade or more. Yes, for the very reason that it erases the extra data. you not being able to see me means that you have to go on my words alone, rather than making extra-contextual judgements about me as a whole based on my physical appearance. That seems only to cement my point, though.
amyjess 8y ago
Several of these points can be boiled down to "When people say ASCII, they really mean ISO 8859-1 or CP 1252".

by JdeBP 8y ago

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago

So in actual fact English was adapted to the medium, albeit minimally.

fao_ 8y ago
The end result of adapting our language to the medium is to lose in expressibility and gain in portability. Forcing technology to catch up is a more coherent option in the long run
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  That's the exact same trade off we made for writing in the first place. Yet here we are still conversing with text despite the technology to record and send each other video having been widely available for a decade or more.
  - fao_ 8y ago
    That's specious reasoning. If you mean, body language is the main or majority channel for communication, well, how much body lanuage matters to communication is contested and differs based on context anyway (see: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/beyond-words/201109/is-nonverbal-communication-numbers-game https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/beyond-words/201109/...). If you mean, there is a loss of expressibility going from the spoken word to the written word. Is there? You would have to prove that that loss is as significant as the symbolic/representational destruction you are advocating. Much of the imperfect synonyms we have developed in english are used to signal tone and intent -- things that are usually signalled in body language. So, just because we are using the written word does not mean we cannot express those things. You have something in a larger space, you can represent it in a smaller space using longer and more complex series of glyphs. > Yet here we are still conversing with text despite the technology to record and send each other video having been widely available for a decade or more. Yes, for the very reason that it erases the extra data. you not being able to see me means that you have to go on my words alone, rather than making extra-contextual judgements about me as a whole based on my physical appearance. That seems only to cement my point, though.

amyjess 8y ago

Several of these points can be boiled down to "When people say ASCII, they really mean ISO 8859-1 or CP 1252".