Path: csiph.com!weretis.net!feeder9.news.weretis.net!panix!.POSTED.panix5.panix.com!qz!not-for-mail From: Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: Recent history of vi Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2025 07:15:57 -0000 (UTC) Organization: Some absurd concept Message-ID: References: <10ga781$7ph$2@news.misty.com> <10gpb0a$jpt$4@news.misty.com> Injection-Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2025 07:15:57 -0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: reader2.panix.com; posting-host="panix5.panix.com:166.84.1.5"; logging-data="26564"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@panix.com" User-Agent: Vectrex rn 2.1 (beta) X-Liz: It's actually happened, the entire Internet is a massive game of Redcode X-Motto: "Erosion of rights never seems to reverse itself." -- kenny@panix X-US-Congress: Moronic Fucks. X-Attribution: EtB XFrom: is a real address Encrypted: double rot-13 Xref: csiph.com comp.os.linux.misc:78278 alt.folklore.computers:232367 In comp.os.linux.misc, Johnny Billquist wrote: > On 2025-11-27 20:16, Carlos E.R. wrote: >> And 8 bit ascii letters are also numbers representing characters. That's >> how computers work. Not all computers are 8-bit. > Right. So both ASCII and Unicode use numbers to represent characters. > Note that UTF-8 didn't get mentioned in that sentence. What is your point? Touch-tone phones and rotary (pulse) dialing use electrical signals to represent numbers. Most-significan-bit computers and least-significan-bit wire communication of ASCII or EBCDIC or UTF-16 all encode the letter capital A differently. (Are there parity bits? Stop bits? More variables!) You'll want to know both which characters are being represented and which encoding has been used to make sense of a message. (And figuring out cryptoanalist style is fine, but you are still figuring out the set and the encoding to do so.) Unicode is a set of numbered characters. UTF-8 or UTF-16 or ... is an encoding for those numbers. Elijah ------ .- ... -.-. .. .. ...-.-