7 bits ought to be enough for everyone!
On Thu, Aug 05, 2010 at 07:50:16PM +0000, Matthew Szudzik wrote:
> 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.
