4 ms·

None of your complaints make any sense. If you limit your usage to ASCII characters, then all of your complaints of Unicode no longer apply. E.g. character leng

by rcme 3y ago

None of your complaints make any sense. If you limit your usage to ASCII characters, then all of your complaints of Unicode no longer apply. E.g. character length matches your intuition of “number of characters”.

bruce511 3y ago
Firstly we live in a world where limiting yourself to ASCII characters is increasingly untenable. There are plenty of non-ascii characters in Spanish or European names. So your argument about limiting to ASCII is like saying its also not a problem if we don't use computers. Sure, you're right, but it's not terribly practical. Plus your argument uses the word Unicode (a mapping) where it only applies to utf-8, (a specific encoding ). This inaccurate use of the terms is the very issue I'm alluding to. Incidentally I'm not complaining about Unicode. Unicode is necessary and good. My comment is that (mostly older, but not exclusively) programmers find it hard to grasp the nuances of unicode and think of it as a encoding, not a mapping.
- rcme 3y ago
  > Firstly we live in a world where limiting yourself to ASCII characters is increasingly untenable. I agree. But your original comment bemoaned the difference between using ASCII and Unicode encodings. I was just pointing out that any Unicode encoding is not variable length of you limit yourself to ASCII. This applies to all Unicode encodings, not just utf-8.
  - bruce511 3y ago
    I might not have been clear in the original posting. I wasn't intending to bemoan the difference, I was bemoaning old programmers (like me) not being familiar with the most basic unicode concepts, which leads to lots of issues. Yes, if you limit your strings to ASCII then they are always 1 byte long (utf-8), or 2 bytes long (utf-16) or 4 bytes long (utf-32). So you still need to know which encoding is in play. But you can then randomly access "the 4th character". My follow up points out though that this is meaningless. Because in the real world you cannot limit your strings to just ASCII in the first place. So your point is moot from that perspective.

by rcme 3y ago

bruce511 3y ago

Firstly we live in a world where limiting yourself to ASCII characters is increasingly untenable. There are plenty of non-ascii characters in Spanish or European names. So your argument about limiting to ASCII is like saying its also not a problem if we don't use computers. Sure, you're right, but it's not terribly practical. Plus your argument uses the word Unicode (a mapping) where it only applies to utf-8, (a specific encoding ). This inaccurate use of the terms is the very issue I'm alluding to. Incidentally I'm not complaining about Unicode. Unicode is necessary and good. My comment is that (mostly older, but not exclusively) programmers find it hard to grasp the nuances of unicode and think of it as a encoding, not a mapping.

rcme 3y ago
> Firstly we live in a world where limiting yourself to ASCII characters is increasingly untenable. I agree. But your original comment bemoaned the difference between using ASCII and Unicode encodings. I was just pointing out that any Unicode encoding is not variable length of you limit yourself to ASCII. This applies to all Unicode encodings, not just utf-8.
- bruce511 3y ago
  I might not have been clear in the original posting. I wasn't intending to bemoan the difference, I was bemoaning old programmers (like me) not being familiar with the most basic unicode concepts, which leads to lots of issues. Yes, if you limit your strings to ASCII then they are always 1 byte long (utf-8), or 2 bytes long (utf-16) or 4 bytes long (utf-32). So you still need to know which encoding is in play. But you can then randomly access "the 4th character". My follow up points out though that this is meaningless. Because in the real world you cannot limit your strings to just ASCII in the first place. So your point is moot from that perspective.