3 ms·
I've never taken a college compsci course before but I've written UTF-8 to UTF-32 converters before as a part of a project. Do Unicode/other character encodings
by knolax 7y ago
I've never taken a college compsci course before but I've written UTF-8 to UTF-32 converters before as a part of a project. Do Unicode/other character encodings really need to be explicitly taught in a class? Most of the complicated behavior (like left to right text, precomposed characters and decomposed characters, grapheme vs. code point vs. glyph) gets abstracted away and would probably require a semester course to teach in depth while the general concepts (character encodings turn text into numbers, Unicode is the one with the funny faces) on the other hand are so widely known that I'm pretty sure even lay-people are aware of them on a basic level.
- tialaramex 7y agoUTF-8 in particular seems like a nice thing to show in data structures and algorithms 10x course. Here's a problem, and here is the beautiful yet practical data structure that somebody came up with to solve that problem. I agree that getting into details of text rendering and so on is one of those 3xx or 4xx courses with narrow appeal because maybe one student in a thousand will actually make use of this knowledge, but grokking why UTF-8 is how it is and the basic outlines of Unicode seems very broadly applicable.