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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?"
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.