On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 5:49 AM, Matthew Szudzik <[email protected]> wrote: ... > But it's even worse, because unicode also violates the principle > (established by Alan Turing in 1936) that any two characters should be > humanly distinguishable "at a glance".
[Citation needed] > This has led to the invention of > punycode for translating unicode strings into humanly distinguishable > ASCII strings. But then why did we switch from ASCII to unicode in the > first place? Umm, punycode wasn't developed because of problems with distinguishability. Indeed, it does nothing to solve those, so I'm not sure why you would suggest that. punycode exists to encode unicode across a transport that is, in effect, in base36, with various requirements on interpretation. > It's my opinion that unicode shouldn't have a place in the Unix > terminal. You might want your GUI to display unicode characters, but > when I'm working from a terminal, I want to see the data as closely as > possible to the way that the computer "sees" the data. So you want to see '41' instead of the letter 'A'? That's "how the computer sees the data"... > For example, I don't want nvi to display unicode characters, I want to see each > individual 8-bit byte that composes the character. I don't want unicode > on the command line. Those that are wedded to plain ASCII can continue to have that experience by using LC_ALL=C. Oops, never mind, OpenBSD hasn't actually implemented "plain ASCII only" for years. Philip Guenther
