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You only need one sentence to explain why ASCII isn't sufficient: There are languages other than English.
by TheCoelacanth 7y ago
You only need one sentence to explain why ASCII isn't sufficient: There are languages other than English.
- msla 7y agoAnd you're naïve if you think ASCII suffices for English. I wouldn't give you ½¢ for an OS incapable of handling Unicode and UTF-8 even if you told me every language other than English were mysteriously destroyed. Going back to ASCII is 180° from what would enrich English-language text.
- ignoramous 7y ago> You only need one sentence to explain why ASCII isn't sufficient Nitpick: ASCII is sufficient when you consider that Base64, despite its 33% overhead from representing 6 bits with 8 bits, makes life easier for certain classes of software.
- dtech 7y agoYou still need an encoding to represent non-ASCII characters like ë or 木. Base64 is no help at all there
- TheCoelacanth 7y agoBase64 is an encoding for representing bytes[0] in ASCII. That doesn't help you represent text unless you already have an encoding for representing text in bytes (e.g. UTF8). [0] Octets if you want to be pedantic
- ignoramous 7y agoWhat I was alluding to is, I often convert any binary data, including text, to Base64 to avoid dealing with cross platform, cross language, cross format, cross storage, cross network data-handling. Only the layer that needs to deal with the blob's actual string representation needs to worry about encoding schemes that are outside the purview of the humble ASCII table.
- naniwaduni 7y agoBase64 encodes sextets. The mapping from octets to sextets is mostly settled for set of three octets at a time, but the situation for lengths not divisible by 6 is a mess.