4 ms·
> The page says the reason for excluding U is "accidental obscenity'. Crockford is being cheeky. To make a nice base32 alphabet out of non-confusable alphanume
by kibwen 3y ago
> The page says the reason for excluding U is "accidental obscenity'.
Crockford is being cheeky. To make a nice base32 alphabet out of non-confusable alphanumeric characters you only need to exclude O, I, and L. This leaves you with 33 characters still, so you need to remove one more, and it doesn't matter which one you remove, so you might as well pick an arbitrary reason for the last character that gets removed (and it's not the worst reason, if your goal is to use these as user-readable IDs, although obviously it's not even remotely bulletproof).
- pluijzer 3y agoYou could argue that U can be confused with V.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y agoA vaguely related historical tangent is that V and U used to be just two ways of writing the same letter in Early Modern English. Which I imagine is why W is named as "double U" in speaking.
- jabbany 3y agoThis is also interesting since in French (and I think Spanish?) W is (correctly) called "double V"
- namtab00 3y agoIn Romanian and Italian too.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y agoSame thing in Norwegian. But W is also not really a part of Norwegian orthography, it's just kind of there in the alphabet anyway. Only useful for names and maybe a couple loanwords.
- EGreg 3y agoSame with B and V, P and F, SS and Z, etc. It is why PH is F, for instance.
- TRiG_Ireland 3y agoThat is indeed why w is named "double u" in English (and "double v" in French. And why it's a vowel in Welsh. See more from jan Misali: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg2j7mZ9-2Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg2j7mZ9-2Y
- dmurray 3y ago5 and S seems more likely.
- quickthrower2 3y agoFvck!
- quickthrower2 3y agoU is a fairly new letter anyway.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dolmen 3y agoThis assumes that english is the only relevant language regarding curse words. Which is quite biased.