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My favorite software! What's yours?
f0dder:
UNICODE is a big can of worms.
One big issue is that we old-school programmers are used to dealing with 'characters'. One character = one item displayed on screen. Unicode changes things around a lot, with terms such as "code points", "glyphs", ... and even when you use UTF-16 encoding (windows' unicode format), one 16-bit isn't necessarily enough to display one glyph on the screen.
To make matters worse, things like comparing strings for equality becomes very hard - should the german ß be treated equally to "ss"? Some glyphs may look equal on screen, but be different characters. A glyph can be constructed by multiple code points in different order (this can be fixed via canonization though). And what about upper/lower casing? Not every language supported by unicode has a concept of this.
Too bad the entire world wasn't colonized by England, and all previous history/culture/LANGUAGE burnt :p
Curt:
:p
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Because of the ":p" I will forgive you, f0dder - but I happen to like our æ, ø and å...
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But Thank You to Horst and f0dder for these two mini lessons. I have learned more about Unicode during the last five minutes than ever before - I thought it was some kind of wonder technique. :up:
Armando:
Too bad the entire world wasn't colonized by England, and all previous history/culture/LANGUAGE burnt :p
-f0dder (April 14, 2008, 12:22 PM)
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:) Ahah. Yes. It makes it pretty complicated. Sometimes I wouldn't mind getting rid of French -- I'm not to attached to the thing. Uselessly intricate.
iphigenie:
I'm not sure about the idea of the english culture being the only one in the world... especially if all the other cultures had disappeared before they improved the english one a bit
The whole world would be eating boiled food and living in a caste culture :o
f0dder:
iphigenie: it was meant jokingly, in frustration. I really would wish that we'd have only one language to bother about, though, and English wouldn't be the worst choice for that. It's sane computing wise, and while there's a lot of exceptions and quirks, it's a very rich language with a very rich vocabulary (exhume always comes to mind - a verb for "dig up dead people", how crazy is that :)).
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