4 ms·
Ok so fine, we allow people to write filenames top-to-bottom. So programs that show the filename in the title bar: how do they display it? Really big title bar
by overgard 13y ago
Ok so fine, we allow people to write filenames top-to-bottom.
So programs that show the filename in the title bar: how do they display it? Really big title bar? Align the title bar on the left or right? What if I mix english and Kannada? What then?
Or what if I start with an english word in the terminal, and then switch to kannada, what's the terminal supposed to do?
I haven't used a lot of asian language systems, but I'm going to guess two things that I'm pretty sure are true:
A) they're already implicitly dealing with these restrictions, whether the file system enforces it or not
B) they probably already have workarounds to deal with these cases anyway. (alternate scripts or whatever).
Regardless of culture, I'm going to make what I think is a pretty obvious statement: good filenames are easy to type and unambiguous. If your filename is neither of those, it's not a good filename. The point of a filename isn't to be as expressive as possible, it's to be universal, descriptive, and easy to work with. None of that requires special characters.
With regard to the space thing, I think it's overblown. Spaces are common enough that good software engineers think to handle it. Newlines in files? I've /never/ seen that, even though it's possible. Also, space doesn't require an escape character. Once you start getting to newlines, it does. Once you start introducing escape characters into it, it's an entirely new layer of complexity.
- hdevalence 13y agoWhy are ASCII regarded as "normal characters", but Kannada, or Hangul, or Arabic, or whatever are "special characters"?
- jerf 13y agoThere is a reasonable, non-"culturist" answer to your question, which is that ASCII admits of a monospace typesetting in which each character is fully isolated in its own box and does not interact with any others across the box, nor are there any combining marks or any of the other vagueries of Unicode, and there's a very limited number of such characters. Possibly Hangul can claim that, I know Arabic and some other scripts can not. Other languages that can claim this include I believe all European languages (the accents are rare enough you can just represent them as characters of their own rather than combining marks) and Cyrillic. None of the ideographic languages can currently claim this, though I heard rumors that Japanese and Chinese are both experiencing some heavy pressure internally to go to an alphabetic subset of their language that actually would meet this criterion. (And not due to authoritative mandate, but rather the natural flow of language.) It is a problem when you have languages with fundamentally different rules trying to share the screen, and that is also not a culturist observation; indeed one would think that denying this would be the culturist position.
- asdffdsa33 13y agoFor Japanese, in a Unicode context, I've never seen a combining mark actually used.
- duskwuff 13y agoWhile the precombined versions are much more common, Japanese does have combining characters to add voiced and semi-voiced marks to syllabic characters (e.g, か vs が, は vs. ぱ).
- asdffdsa33 13y agoIt does, but I've never seen them used in a Unicode context.
- jerf 13y agoThe ideographic languages can't claim "a limited number of characters". (7-bit) ASCII fits on a typewriter ball. (By "limited", I meant small, rather than merely finite.) Of the various points I mentioned, in modern times this is probably the least important, now that RAM, ROM, and CPU are so dirt cheap. This wasn't always true.
- josteink 13y ago> So programs that show the filename in the title bar: how do they display it? That hardly sounds like a file-system issue. That's an application and UI-design issue. Just because you think some of these issues are hard and you don't know how to deal with them on an application level (beacuse you haven't had to yet), doesn't make that a valid reason into limiting the capabilities of the file-system.
- einhverfr 13y agoShouldn't display be a feature of the locale?