5 ms·
> We could also use UTF8, but since we assumed the language is German, we’ll stick to ASCII German cannot be expressed in ASCII[1]. For that fact, neither can
by franciscop 7y ago
> We could also use UTF8, but since we assumed the language is German, we’ll stick to ASCII
German cannot be expressed in ASCII[1]. For that fact, neither can Chinese nor Spanish, the two most spoken languages besides English. Also UTF8 doesn't even encode all the languages ever spoken. So IMHO this is at least an order of magnitude wrong.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9222071 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9222071
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- someperson 7y agoThey probably meant ISO/IEC 8859-15 8-bit encoding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-15 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-15
- QuadrupleA 7y agoEach character in e.g. Chinese represents more information, so there are fewer of them, which sorta cancels out. I thought German was a good conservative choice here.
- dspig 7y agoGerman can be expressed on ascii just fine - ae oe ue ss are commonly used and understood when the non-ascii characters are unavailable or just hard to find. So for this purpose would be fine, except possibly introducing ambiguity in some words or names that already use the ascii version.
- jl6 7y agoFor what it’s worth, there are English words which cannot be encoded in ASCII too. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_terms_with_diacritical_marks https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_terms_with_diacritic...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]