3 ms·

ASCII is enough to write English, or, at least, it used to be back when ASCII was a multi-byte encoding for Latin! I know, it sounds crazy, but it used to be a

ASCII is enough to write English, or, at least, it used to be back when ASCII was a multi-byte encoding for Latin! I know, it sounds crazy, but it used to be a thing to use over-strike using back-space. E.g., ë was e BS ", ø was o BS /, etc. It was a thing back in the days of typewriters. I believe this is the reason that upper-case letters in Spanish are allowed to be written without accents even when they are needed otherwise, that accented upper-case letters were hard to produce with typewriters and ASCII fonts.

quietbritishjim 5y ago
> ASCII was a multi-byte encoding for Latin The comment you're replying to just said ASCII without qualification. By definition this is not multibyte, or even whole byte (assuming by byte you mean octet). ASCII is a 7 bit standard, anything else is some other encoding.
- cryptonector 5y ago
  Slow down and enjoy some humor once in a while my friend. I'm quite certain that ASCII was designed to make overstrike feasible. Overstrike just wasn't explicitly part of the standard. The quip about it being a "multi-byte encoding for Latin" was a joke made funnier (to me, and perhaps only to me) by having a kernel of truth in it.
mkotowski 5y ago
> ASCII is enough to write English, or, at least, it used to be back when ASCII was a multi-byte encoding for Latin! I know of both the over-strike method for traditional typewriters and extended ASCII. But I have no knowlede of a ASCII (extended or not) supporting every sign commonly used in English. Granted, it is not as significant as other languages missing whole letters, but signs like ”,“,—,–,’, which are often replaced with simpler ASCII alternative (",') or their combination (---,--). Over-strike, from what I remember wasn’t implemented in any well-spread way with standalone ASCII, although I could be simply not aware of it. It gives us then a few more characters rarely used in English language in loanwords (née, naïve, façade). Skipping diacritics with uppercase letters on displays with too little space happens with Polish language too, so I am aware of the practice.
- cryptonector 5y ago
  Are endashes and emdashes part of English though? In any case, yes, overstrike is just an approximation, but believe it or not, ASCII was designed to make it possible. And yes, it kinda sucks, and yes, it doesn't really make ASCII a multi-byte encoding, not exactly. But it's a funny thought that ASCII kinda almost was a multi-byte encoding. One can imagine ASCII evolving to treat BS<mark> as not unlike Unicode combining codepoints to make it possible to get proper diacritics even on capital letters, but ASCII would still have been a dead end, naturally.

quietbritishjim 5y ago

> ASCII was a multi-byte encoding for Latin The comment you're replying to just said ASCII without qualification. By definition this is not multibyte, or even whole byte (assuming by byte you mean octet). ASCII is a 7 bit standard, anything else is some other encoding.

cryptonector 5y ago
Slow down and enjoy some humor once in a while my friend. I'm quite certain that ASCII was designed to make overstrike feasible. Overstrike just wasn't explicitly part of the standard. The quip about it being a "multi-byte encoding for Latin" was a joke made funnier (to me, and perhaps only to me) by having a kernel of truth in it.

mkotowski 5y ago

> ASCII is enough to write English, or, at least, it used to be back when ASCII was a multi-byte encoding for Latin! I know of both the over-strike method for traditional typewriters and extended ASCII. But I have no knowlede of a ASCII (extended or not) supporting every sign commonly used in English. Granted, it is not as significant as other languages missing whole letters, but signs like ”,“,—,–,’, which are often replaced with simpler ASCII alternative (",') or their combination (---,--). Over-strike, from what I remember wasn’t implemented in any well-spread way with standalone ASCII, although I could be simply not aware of it. It gives us then a few more characters rarely used in English language in loanwords (née, naïve, façade). Skipping diacritics with uppercase letters on displays with too little space happens with Polish language too, so I am aware of the practice.

cryptonector 5y ago
Are endashes and emdashes part of English though? In any case, yes, overstrike is just an approximation, but believe it or not, ASCII was designed to make it possible. And yes, it kinda sucks, and yes, it doesn't really make ASCII a multi-byte encoding, not exactly. But it's a funny thought that ASCII kinda almost was a multi-byte encoding. One can imagine ASCII evolving to treat BS<mark> as not unlike Unicode combining codepoints to make it possible to get proper diacritics even on capital letters, but ASCII would still have been a dead end, naturally.