3 ms·

The "hack" is to wrongly define "move down, move left" to be the same as "line ending". It isn't. The first are commands to a machine, the second are elements o

by moring 5y ago

The "hack" is to wrongly define "move down, move left" to be the same as "line ending". It isn't. The first are commands to a machine, the second are elements of encoding text in binary storage. Or more general, the "hack" is to act as if ASCII was a character encoding, when it's actually the encoding for a set of commands to a machine.

hnlmorg 5y ago
It's both, and more. It's also document encoding (there's characters to encode structured data too). Given the era ASCII was invented, I wouldn't really call it a hack. Character encodings were one of the lowest level abstractions. The size of a byte wasn't always fixed to 8 bits and it was the number of bits in your character set that often defined how big your byte was (yes, I know ASCII is technically 7-bit but one of the original considerations was that the 8th bit would be a parity bit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parity_bit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parity_bit ). It's also the reason the lowest size of addressable data is a byte / char. Bare in mind that we are talking about an era before operating systems as we recognize them. Back then each machine would have it's own operating system and some institutes would even have different operating systems despite having the same machines. Really these operating systems were more like firmware than what we have today. So there wasn't any distinction between character encodings and machine commands but there were differences between machines. So it made sense that ASCII was cross purpose because that's exactly what characters were: raw addressable data containing instructions. Those instructions were sometimes printable data, it was sometimes formatting data, and it was sometimes control data. I doubt any designers of ASCII could have even imagined the way we use computers these days when writing that specification. Even just the fact that character encodings have become an interchangeable abstraction for rendering text would have blown their minds. Never mind everything else.

by moring 5y ago

hnlmorg 5y ago

It's both, and more. It's also document encoding (there's characters to encode structured data too). Given the era ASCII was invented, I wouldn't really call it a hack. Character encodings were one of the lowest level abstractions. The size of a byte wasn't always fixed to 8 bits and it was the number of bits in your character set that often defined how big your byte was (yes, I know ASCII is technically 7-bit but one of the original considerations was that the 8th bit would be a parity bit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parity_bit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parity_bit ). It's also the reason the lowest size of addressable data is a byte / char. Bare in mind that we are talking about an era before operating systems as we recognize them. Back then each machine would have it's own operating system and some institutes would even have different operating systems despite having the same machines. Really these operating systems were more like firmware than what we have today. So there wasn't any distinction between character encodings and machine commands but there were differences between machines. So it made sense that ASCII was cross purpose because that's exactly what characters were: raw addressable data containing instructions. Those instructions were sometimes printable data, it was sometimes formatting data, and it was sometimes control data. I doubt any designers of ASCII could have even imagined the way we use computers these days when writing that specification. Even just the fact that character encodings have become an interchangeable abstraction for rendering text would have blown their minds. Never mind everything else.