4 ms·

ebcdic is also quite elegant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13543715 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13543715

gerdesj 2y ago
Its shit if you don't routinely speak or write English. On those grounds, I'll decry it as not only shit but purposely shit. OK a bit over the top ... the designers of EBCSDIC had a rather tight set of constraints to deal with, none of which included: "be inclusive". Again, if I really had to be charitable (I looked after a System/36, back in the day), the hardware was rather shit too, sorry ... constrained. Yes constrained. Why should six inch fans fire up reliably after a few years of use and not need a poke after an IPL? No real dust snags and I carefully sprayed some WD40 on the one that I could get at. I have modern Dells and HPs in horrid environments that do better with shitty plastic fans. EBCDIC is not elegant at all unless excluding non English characters in an encoding system is your idea of elegant. According to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBCDIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBCDIC it expended loads of effort with dealing with control eg: "SM/SW" instead of language. ASCII and EBCDIC and that basically say: fuck you foreigners! We now have hardware that is apparently capable of messianic feats. Let's do the entirety of humanity some justice and really do something elegant. It won't involve EBCDIC.
theamk 2y ago
It's really not. In base-2 machines, the letters are mixed with punctuation, which is pretty horrible design which makes simple things complex, and does not actually bring anything new to the table. In BCD machines it is slightly better, except letters aren't contiguous either - row 0 is bad, but it's the extra space between R and S which is really ugly. And it's unusable with BCD operations anyway, as high nibble values are used extensively. Naive sorting simply does not work... lowercase before uppercase, punctuation in the middle of the alphabet, numbers after letters. I see no elegance there, it's like the worst example of legacy code.
- jiveturkey 2y ago
  It was designed for a specific purpose ... elegance in context
  - theamk 2y ago
    Which would that "specific purpose" be? Even punch cards have alphabet interrupted between R and S. And the whole punch card -> 8-bit is pretty illogical, just like the cards themselves. How come no punches in zone don't correspond to 0 high bits? (and don't get me started on punch card.. it started with "let's do 1 hole per column for digits" - OK, makes sense; then "let's do 2 hole/column for uppercase" - I guess OK but why did you put extra char in the middle... but then it's 4 holes/column for superscripts? 3-6 holes/col for punctuation? If someone were to design punch cards today but using same requirements, they could easily come up with a much more logical schema)

gerdesj 2y ago

Its shit if you don't routinely speak or write English. On those grounds, I'll decry it as not only shit but purposely shit. OK a bit over the top ... the designers of EBCSDIC had a rather tight set of constraints to deal with, none of which included: "be inclusive". Again, if I really had to be charitable (I looked after a System/36, back in the day), the hardware was rather shit too, sorry ... constrained. Yes constrained. Why should six inch fans fire up reliably after a few years of use and not need a poke after an IPL? No real dust snags and I carefully sprayed some WD40 on the one that I could get at. I have modern Dells and HPs in horrid environments that do better with shitty plastic fans. EBCDIC is not elegant at all unless excluding non English characters in an encoding system is your idea of elegant. According to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBCDIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBCDIC it expended loads of effort with dealing with control eg: "SM/SW" instead of language. ASCII and EBCDIC and that basically say: fuck you foreigners! We now have hardware that is apparently capable of messianic feats. Let's do the entirety of humanity some justice and really do something elegant. It won't involve EBCDIC.

theamk 2y ago

It's really not. In base-2 machines, the letters are mixed with punctuation, which is pretty horrible design which makes simple things complex, and does not actually bring anything new to the table. In BCD machines it is slightly better, except letters aren't contiguous either - row 0 is bad, but it's the extra space between R and S which is really ugly. And it's unusable with BCD operations anyway, as high nibble values are used extensively. Naive sorting simply does not work... lowercase before uppercase, punctuation in the middle of the alphabet, numbers after letters. I see no elegance there, it's like the worst example of legacy code.

jiveturkey 2y ago
It was designed for a specific purpose ... elegance in context
- theamk 2y ago
  Which would that "specific purpose" be? Even punch cards have alphabet interrupted between R and S. And the whole punch card -> 8-bit is pretty illogical, just like the cards themselves. How come no punches in zone don't correspond to 0 high bits? (and don't get me started on punch card.. it started with "let's do 1 hole per column for digits" - OK, makes sense; then "let's do 2 hole/column for uppercase" - I guess OK but why did you put extra char in the middle... but then it's 4 holes/column for superscripts? 3-6 holes/col for punctuation? If someone were to design punch cards today but using same requirements, they could easily come up with a much more logical schema)