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> The question is less interesting for ordinary characters like 'a', since the codes for those are presumably baked into the keyboard hardware and the font file
by floren 2y ago
> The question is less interesting for ordinary characters like 'a', since the codes for those are presumably baked into the keyboard hardware and the font files, and no further translation is needed.
It's true that the question is less interesting for regular characters, but your explanation why is way off base.
Consider a computer whose only I/O is a serial console. It is concerned with neither a keyboard nor a font file.
- LegionMammal978 2y agoFor a computer whose only I/O is a serial console, I'd say that it has no character 'a', but only a character 0x61 with such-and-such properties and relationships with other characters. It's when we press the 'A' key on our keyboard and get 0x61 out, or put 0x61 in and see the glyph 'a' on a display or a printout, that the code becomes associated with our human concept of the letter. That is, suppose I design a font file so that character 0x61 has glyph 'b' and 0x62 has glyph 'a', and I accordingly swap the key caps for 'A' and 'B' on my keyboard. If I write a document with this font file and print it off, then no one looking at it could tell that my characters had the wrong codes. Only the spell-checker on my computer would complain, since it's still following its designers' ideas of the character codes 0x61 and 0x62 are supposed to mean within a word.