3 ms·
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 ac
by 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 agoIt was designed for a specific purpose ... elegance in context
- theamk 2y agoWhich 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)