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If you want to teach someone how an encoding works, why would you not tell them that a single symbol can take multiple codepoints? It seems like you're advocat
by asveikau 3y ago
If you want to teach someone how an encoding works, why would you not tell them that a single symbol can take multiple codepoints?
It seems like you're advocating people learning incorrect information and forming their impressions of it on falsehood. Which is probably why people think utf-32 frees you from variable-length encoding.
- Dylan16807 3y agoYou should tell them, yes. And talk about it more at some point. But you don't have to go into much detail when today's lesson is specifically teaching UTF-8 or UTF-32. I don't know about you, but I think I could teach the latter about ten times faster. As part of a comprehensive dive into Unicode it's a minor part, but for teaching an encoding it's a significant difference.
- asveikau 3y ago> I think I could teach the latter about ten times faster. I've lectured computer science at the university level, and I think you could introduce all this information to a CS undergrad pretty coherently and design a lab or small assignment on it no problem. Maybe you could ask them to parse some emojis that require multiple 32-bit codepoints.
- Dylan16807 3y agoThat sounds entirely reasonable, but you have to deal with a lot less engagement when you're teaching via blog post or similar.