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Mr. Pike, Tear Down This ASCII Wall!
theodp writes "To move forward with programming languages, argues Poul-Henning Kamp, we need to break free from the tyranny of ASCII. While Kamp admires programming language designers like the Father-of-Go Rob Pike, he simply can't forgive Pike for 'trying to cram an expressive syntax into the straitjacket of the 95 glyphs of ASCII when Unicode has been the new black for most of the past decade.' Kamp adds: 'For some reason computer people are so conservative that we still find it more uncompromisingly important for our source code to be compatible with a Teletype ASR-33 terminal and its 1963-vintage ASCII table than it is for us to be able to express our intentions clearly.' So, should the new Hello World look more like this?"
Everyone who tried to do something useful in APL, put up your hand.
Japanese is typed using a more-or-less standard QWERTY keyboard.
Because I don't want to have to own a 2000 key keyboard, or alternatively learn a shitload of special key combos to produce all sorts of symbols. The usefulness of ASCII, and just of the English/Germanic/Latin character set and Arabic numerals in general is that it is fairly small. You don't need many individual glyphs to represent what you are talking about. A normal 101 key keyboard is enough to type it out and have enough extra keys for controls that we need.
To see the real absurdity of it, apply the same logic to the numerals of the character set. Let's stop using Arabic numerals, let's use something more. Let's have special symbols to denote commonly used values (like 20, 25, 100, 1000). Let's have different number sets for different bases so that a 3 can be told what base its in just by the way it looks! ...
Or maybe not. Maybe we should stick with the Arabic numerals. There's a reason they are so widely used: The Indians/Arabs got it right. It is simple, direct, and we can represent any number we need easily. Combining them with simple character indicators like H to indicate hex works just fine for base as well.
You might notice that even languages that don't use the English/ASCII character set tend to use keyboards that use it. Japanese and Chinese enter transliterated expressions that the computer then interprets as glyphs. Doesn't have to be that way, they could different keyboards, some of them rather large depending on the character set being used, but they don't. It is easy and convenient to just use the smaller, widely used, character set.
Now none of this means that you can't use Unicode in code, that strings can't be stored using it, that programs can't display it. Indeed most programs these days can handle it, just fine. However to start coding in it? To try and design languages to interpret it? To make things more complex for their own sake? Why?
I am just trying to figure out what he thinks would be gained here. Also remembering that the programming languages, the compilers, would need to be changed at the low level. Compilers do not take ambiguity, if a command is going to change from a string of ASCII characters to a single unicode one, that has to be changed in the compiler, made clear in the language specs and so on.
Sun's Fortress language allowed you to use real, LaTeX-formatted math as source code. They reasoned, correctly I think, that for the mathematically literate, this would make the programs far clearer. Google for Fortress Programming Language Tutorial.
Japanese is typed using a more-or-less standard QWERTY keyboard.
Tediously.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
This is untrue.
First off, Simplified and Traiditional characters are separated in Unicode.
Second off, Cyrillic characters and Latin characters have always been considered two different scripts, while Chinese logographs are considered to be the same script, used in different contexts.
See http://unicode.org/notes/tn26/.
In any event, it would make good sense for programming environments to be able to handle Unicode source.
I'm Japanese, so let me clarify how entering Japanese works here: Japanese is composed of two sets of Kana (characters with no meaning but they have a sound) and Kanji (characters with meaning). To enter a word in Japanese, let's say the word "Me/I" you would hit hit a key to activate your IME [input method editor] - usually the key on the top left of the keyboard, then type "watashi", just like that, and you would get in kana (hiragana). Next hit the space key, that converts it to kanji. Now hit enter to finish input or just start typing your next word. You can also enter multiple words, hit space, and then break up and convert the sentence all at once. It is not difficult, you don't actually need a special keyboard, and I've never heard of anybody capable of using a keyboard using voice recognition because they found the act of entering in words laborious.