On Thu, Aug 05, 2010 at 11:33:23AM -0700, Philip Guenther wrote: > 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
Although punycode may not have been developed to solve problems with distinguishability, it is used for that purpose. For example, punycode is commonly used as a defense against phishers who impersonate online banks using URLs that are indistinguishable from the banks' actual URLs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack But with a properly-designed font, ASCII characters are all easily distinguishable. > > 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"... I simply want to be able to know "at one glance" what data the computer is using. For that purpose, it is unnecessary to decode an "A" as 0x41. The ASCII character is sufficient. > experience by using LC_ALL=C. Oops, never mind, OpenBSD hasn't > actually implemented "plain ASCII only" for years. The fact that OpenBSD doesn't implement "plain ASCII only" doesn't mean that it shouldn't. ;) And by the way, the Turing quote is from the paper in which he first proposed the idea of a mechanical computer. He argued that it is sufficient for a computer to have a finite character set where each character can be distinguished at a glance. His argument begins at the bottom of this page: http://www.turingarchive.org/viewer/?id=466&title=01u and continues onto the top of the next. Although it is not necessary that we follow his proposal, it has served as a historical precedent since the very beginning of computing.
