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It's a pretty amazing coincidence how it just so happens that English is (one of) the most convenient languages to encode into bytes.
by xxpor 6y ago
It's a pretty amazing coincidence how it just so happens that English is (one of) the most convenient languages to encode into bytes.
- tinco 6y agoHow is that? I don't know about Chinese, but surely Japanese has much better entropy in bytes? As would other languages with more expressive character sets.
- xxpor 6y agoThat's the issue. English can be represented with 7 bits. Good luck doing that for any logographic language. And that doesn't even take into account that since English (and a lot of alphabet based languages) use spaces to mark where words begin and end. In Japanese, you can have a word that consists of a kanji plus a few hiragana characters as a grammatical marker. But there's no space between that word and the next. How do you know decide where to insert a line break?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ketralnis 6y agoIt's not a coincidence, the A in ASCII stands for American.
- xxpor 6y agoSure, but just the fact that roman characters with no accents (or just a few), plus all of the punctuation, fits in a 7 or 8 bit key space.
- hcs 6y agoAnd even 5 bits was enough for a long time, across a few European languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudot_code (which I just learned is also where "baud" comes from!)
- goto11 6y agoIs it more convenient than any other phonetic script? I just happened that ASCII was based on English and became the standard.