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Your comment shows a lot of naivety. Text is near universal, C still makes the world go ‘round and modern doesn’t mean graphical.
by JustSomeNobody 7y ago
Your comment shows a lot of naivety. Text is near universal, C still makes the world go ‘round and modern doesn’t mean graphical.
- jcranmer 7y agoText is not universal. Instead, there is a nearly infinite variety of output formats which consists of 96 printable ASCII characters (or perhaps a superset of those characters), that may be unstructured, structured, or semi-structured, using a variety of often ad-hoc and poorly documented formatting for values, and a (sometimes surprisingly small) subset of the outputs can even be read in again as inputs. A great example of this is CSV. It's a wonderfully simple format... so simple that there is considerable variety in things such as "how do you quote a field," "how do you delimit fields" (considering its name is Comma-Separated Values, you'd think everyone would agree it's a comma), and "what characters are legal within fields," let alone the semantic interpretation questions of "is there a header row", "is this column numeric or textual or something else," etc.
- verinus 7y agobut a common misconception of programming is that we write text- we do not! we formulate abstraction that are stored in files. Still I am not in the least interested in files (a problem I have with most IDEs) that make up my component but in packages/namespaces, classes, functions, etc.