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What lifestyle change do you suggest? That people in China (as one example of many) switch to ASCII and stop using Chinese characters when they use computers?
by twblalock 7y ago
What lifestyle change do you suggest? That people in China (as one example of many) switch to ASCII and stop using Chinese characters when they use computers?
Unicode exists because people all over the world want to represent their written language on computers, and that seems like a reasonable thing to want. Software needs to serve reasonable human needs such as writing systems.
- zzo38computer 7y agoUnicode is terrible. They can use Chinese character coding when writing in Chinese on the computer (perhaps cangjie encoding), and use ASCII when dealing with computer codes which are based on ASCII.
- twblalock 7y agoUnicode was invented to avoid the kind of thing you are suggesting, and that's why it is popular. ASCII doesn't even cover all of the characters and symbols that are normally used by English speakers.
- zzo38computer 7y agoYes, although Unicode is still a mess. (One thing Unicode is good for though (if you removed the emoji and a lot of other stuff) is searching documents in multiple languages all from one interface. However, someone on IRC mentioned Duocode, and I think that would be even better for such purpose. But for other purposes it can be variously less good.)
- j88439h84 7y agoDuocode seems to be a javascript compiler, not alternative to unicode.
- zzo38computer 7y agoThat is something else with the same name, and is not the same as the Duocode I saw mentioned on IRC.
- j88439h84 7y agoCan you link to the thing you're talking about?
- amelius 7y ago> ASCII doesn't even cover all of the characters and symbols that are normally used by English speakers. Such as?
- dri_ft 7y agoForward and backward quote marks. Different kinds of dash - the en-dash and em-dash.
- sly010 7y agoEmojis.
- amelius 7y agoSome people would argue that emojis don't belong in Unicode because they evolve too quickly and new ones need to be added too often, and the Unicode standard simply won't be able to keep up. As such it would hinder the expression of users, and it would stifle the evolution of online expression.