Groups | Search | Server Info | Keyboard shortcuts | Login | Register [http] [https] [nntp] [nntps]

Groups > comp.misc > #15075

Around the world with Unicode

Show all headers | View raw

https://norasandler.com/2017/11/02/Around-the-with-Unicode.html

A pretty funny read (all hail the brakcet!!!):

//-- clip
Unicode is really exciting, because it lets software handle two things:

    Emoji.
    All written human language

The first point is obviously the most important, but the second is also
pretty interesting. It turns out that cultures and languages are
complicated, which means writing systems are complicated, which means
that the Unicode standard is also complicated. It also turns out that
character encoding standards aren’t value-neutral. This blog post is a
very informal survey of some cool, interesting and surprising things
about Unicode.

What is Unicode?

Computers store all data as a series of bits, and this obviously
includes text. So computers need to know which series of bits
corresponds to which character. Back in Ye Olden Times most systems in
English-speaking countries used ASCII, which encoded each character
using 7 bits. 27 is 128, so you could encode 128 characters. That was
plenty for every upper- and lowercase letter, numbers, punctuation, the
space character, and so on. A byte is 8 bits, so one ASCII character
fits conveniently in a single byte. This was less than ideal if your
application had to handle recipes for soufflés, piña coladas, or
spätzle, and it was completely unworkable for people who used non-Latin
alphabets. So there were a bunch of other encodings for different
alphabets, and it was basically impossible to write software that could
handle text in more than one language (unless, maybe, one of those
languages was English).

So now we have Unicode, which maps every single character in every
writing system to a unique number, called a code point. (Each emoji is
assigned a code point too.) There are a few different ways to translate
code points into actual bits, the most common being UTF-82. If you
support Unicode, you don’t need different encodings for different
languages – you can handle text in any language or mix of languages,
uniformly and with no fuss. As long as you use Unicode all the time,
everything is easy!

This is a lie. Nothing in life is easy.

//-- clip


-- 
RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com>

Back to comp.misc | Previous | Next — Next in thread | Find similar | Unroll thread

Thread

Around the world with Unicode RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2017-12-04 13:34 -0500
  Re: Around the world with Unicode Huge <Huge@nowhere.much.invalid> - 2017-12-04 21:30 +0000
  Re: Around the world with Unicode Marko Rauhamaa <marko@pacujo.net> - 2017-12-04 23:53 +0200
    Re: Around the world with Unicode Bruce Horrocks <07.013@scorecrow.com> - 2017-12-05 00:14 +0000
      Re: Around the world with Unicode Marko Rauhamaa <marko@pacujo.net> - 2017-12-05 09:07 +0200
        Re: Around the world with Unicode Rich <rich@example.invalid> - 2017-12-05 10:58 +0000
          Re: Around the world with Unicode Marko Rauhamaa <marko@pacujo.net> - 2017-12-05 13:24 +0200
            Re: Around the world with Unicode Rich <rich@example.invalid> - 2017-12-05 12:46 +0000
              Re: Around the world with Unicode Marko Rauhamaa <marko@pacujo.net> - 2017-12-05 15:28 +0200
                Re: Around the world with Unicode Rich <rich@example.invalid> - 2017-12-05 18:10 +0000
  Re: Around the world with Unicode Roger Blake <rogblake@iname.invalid> - 2017-12-06 03:48 +0000
    Re: Around the world with Unicode Mike Spencer <mds@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> - 2017-12-06 02:19 -0400
      Re: Around the world with Unicode Marko Rauhamaa <marko@pacujo.net> - 2017-12-06 09:31 +0200
      Re: Around the world with Unicode Rich <rich@example.invalid> - 2017-12-06 11:25 +0000
        Re: Around the world with Unicode Marko Rauhamaa <marko@pacujo.net> - 2017-12-06 15:25 +0200
          Re: Around the world with Unicode "Adam H. Kerman" <ahk@chinet.com> - 2017-12-06 18:32 +0000
            Re: Around the world with Unicode Marko Rauhamaa <marko@pacujo.net> - 2017-12-07 00:22 +0200
              Re: Around the world with Unicode Mike Spencer <mds@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> - 2017-12-06 19:57 -0400
          Re: Around the world with Unicode Rich <rich@example.invalid> - 2017-12-06 18:43 +0000
            Re: Around the world with Unicode Paul Sture <nospam@sture.ch> - 2017-12-06 20:49 +0100
            Re: Around the world with Unicode Marko Rauhamaa <marko@pacujo.net> - 2017-12-07 00:25 +0200
              Re: Around the world with Unicode scott@alfter.diespammersdie.us (Scott Alfter) - 2017-12-06 22:56 +0000
              Re: Around the world with Unicode Rich <rich@example.invalid> - 2017-12-06 22:57 +0000
          Re: Around the world with Unicode Mike Spencer <mds@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> - 2017-12-06 19:48 -0400
            Re: Around the world with Unicode Marko Rauhamaa <marko@pacujo.net> - 2017-12-07 10:02 +0200
              Re: Around the world with Unicode Roger Blake <rogblake@iname.invalid> - 2017-12-07 16:54 +0000
                Re: Around the world with Unicode Mike Spencer <mds@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> - 2017-12-07 14:55 -0400
              Re: Around the world with Unicode Mike Spencer <mds@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> - 2017-12-07 14:43 -0400
                Re: Around the world with Unicode Marko Rauhamaa <marko@pacujo.net> - 2017-12-07 21:09 +0200
                Re: Around the world with Unicode The Real Bev <bashley101@gmail.com> - 2017-12-07 11:48 -0800
                Re: Around the world with Unicode Mike Spencer <mds@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> - 2017-12-08 00:43 -0400

csiph-web