4 ms·
Not even English can be correctly written in (lower) ASCII, it has far too many borrowed words, like naïve and résumé. Say nothing of archaic spellings or liga
by clankyclanker 5y ago
Not even English can be correctly written in (lower) ASCII, it has far too many borrowed words, like naïve and résumé. Say nothing of archaic spellings or ligatures, like encyclopædia, or ruffle. It's almost surprising ASCII was as successful as it is.
- egeozcan 5y ago"Not good enough, but used everywhere so nothing we can do" is the worst enemy of good, even worse than perfectionism.
- mastax 5y agoWorse is Better: https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html
- retrac 5y agoNot that surprising. It was a big improvement over the 6-bit encodings that came before. All caps! And it was broadly assumed from the 70s onward that the 8th bit extended to a regional character set. Even my 1980s Canadian Apple //e supported displaying French characters, in some variant of Latin-1 I think. The easy extensibility of ASCII on 8-bit-byte systems was a big part of its popularity (and eventually its greatest curse when all the divergent extensions started meeting online). Or just consider how the Japanese put up with computing in pure katakana (their writing system's equivalent of all caps) well into the 1980s.
- coldacid 5y agoMost English ligatures (pretty much all other than æ and œ) are simply artifacts of formatting, rather than actual letters. With that in mind, ligature versions of fl and ffl (and the like) are unnecessary.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y agoThere's a person who was involved for years in the maintainance of the venerable CSound audio programming language who specifically changed his last name to ffitch (with a ligature, and no leading capital). I don't know for certain, but I think it was intended to provoke/test/trouble weak text representation in software.