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?"

Comments

The thing with ASCII

[enec]

The thing with ASCII is that it's easy to write on standard keyboards, and does not require a specialized layout. Once someone can cram the necessary unicode symbols into a keyboard so that I don't have to remember arcane meta-codes or fiddle with pressing five different dead keys to get one symbol, I'm all for it.

Re:The thing with ASCII

[arth1]

Once you've had to do an ad-hoc codefix through a serial console or telnet, you appreciate that you can write the code in 7-bit ASCII.

It's not about being conservative. It's about being compatible. Compatibility is not a bad thing, even if it means you have to run your unicode text through a filter to embed it, or store it in external files or databases.

It'd also be hell to do code review on unicode programs. You can't tell many of the symbols apart. Is that a hyphen or a soft hyphen at the end of that line? Or perhaps a minus? And is that a diameter sign, a zero, or the DaNo letter "Ø" over there? Why doesn't that multiplication work? Oh, someone used an asterisk instead of the multiplication symbol which looks the same in this font.

No, thanks, keep it compatible, and parseable by humans, please.

Re:The thing with ASCII

[Angst Badger]

Funny you mention it, but the first thing I thought of was Japanese text entry, followed by the autocorrect/text-expansion facility that most word processors have, which is much the same thing applied to western languages. I've also thought it would be good to be able to make use of mathematical symbols for, you know, mathematics. The same could be said of word processor-like formatting for comments. I'm dubious about using it for actual code, but I'm open to having my mind changed about that.

(Color-as-syntax has already been done in Chuck Moore's latest implementation of Forth. It's not a bad idea, though I suspect it works better with low-level languages like Forth than it would with a higher level language.)

The second thing I thought of was what I always think when someone starts complaining about what languages should and shouldn't have, which is this: Quit bitching and go implement it, smart boy. Come up with something good, and I'll use it, but I am not about to run out and implement someone else's ideas. I have a day job where I get to do that all fucking day long, and they actually pay me. And contrary to popular belief, ideas are cheap and plentiful, including good ideas. The time, effort, and dedication that it takes to actually implement them are what's in short supply.

Re:The thing with ASCII

[Jurily]

If he really wants to go into creative writing, we might remind him that the 26 letters of the alphabet were good enough for Shakespeare.

Exactly. Completely Missing The Point at its best.

1. The idea behind modern programming is reducing complexity. That can't really be done by using symbols no other programmer has ever seen before.
2. Most programming fonts go out of their way to make those symbols look distinct. You simply have to know if that's a zero or an upper-case O. Imagine trying to figure out if that there is a Greek upper-case Omega or a "Dentistry symbol light down and horizontal with wave" (taken from TFA).
3. APL died for a reason.
4. Author cites C++ operator overloading as a good thing. 'Nuff said.

Re:The thing with ASCII

[fyngyrz]

As a martial artist of many decades, I have learned to read Chinese. Both traditional characters and the nasty simplified ones. So I'm well aware of up side - the power, and even beauty, of high-speed recognition from a large symbol set.

But writing Chinese through a keyboard or a GUI has many cautionary lessons for us here that transfer directly to the idea of a many-symbol programming language. Take Python, for instance. A beautiful language in almost every way; visually well structured, minimalist in its core tools, yet so well thought out that it is almost unlimited in what can be done with it.

If you were, say, to create a symbol for each Python grammar atom, you'd soon have a symbol set equal to or surpassing that required for college in China... thousands of them. This takes your average Chinese person many years to learn, by the way -- and it's non-technical.

Now, assuming you've learned these in the first place, and stipulating that somehow, you've made them as beautiful and intuitive as the language itself, how do you select these symbols when programming? Therein lies the rub, and as no one yet has come up with a good answer for Chinese, I suspect the idea desert is just as dry for Python, or any other language one might like to turn into a concise symbolic tool.

Now, speech has very fast mapping (although you get into context a lot... for instance "ma" can mean quite a few different things) to Chinese symbols, and so one could reasonably assume that it could also have reasonably fast mapping to my hypothetical Python symbols, but speech recognition isn't ready for this yet; and a programmer speaking "Pythonese" into a microphone isn't going to be a very good cube-mate, either.

In the meantime, I'm quite convinced that ASCII is an excellent character set for programming, and that UNICODE belongs inside quotes for use in input and output parsing, no more, no less.

APL suffered from all of this. You needed a special keyboard, or a GUI or other mechanism to input the "simple" symbol. You had to learn the symbolic mapping. It really represents a huge extra load in aim of simplification. All of which is completely unnecessary if you simply use ASCII. And frankly... the time it takes me to type sin(x) is going to beat your mapped keyboard input time until you've been doing it for 50 years. In which time I will have leveraged my ASCII toolkit into innumerable languages, and your APL toolkit is still only enabling you to work in APL.

So like I said... ASCII.

Project Gutenberg

[symbolset]

Michael decided to use this huge amount of computer time to search the public domain books that were stored in our libraries, and to digitize these books. He also decided to store the electronic texts (eTexts) in the simplest way, using the plain text format called Plain Vanilla ASCII, so they can be read easily by any machine, operating system or software.

- Marie Lebert

Since its humble beginnings in 1971 Project Gutenberg has reproduced and distributed thousands of works to millions of people in - ultimately - billions of copies. They support ePub now and simple HTML, as well as robo-read audio files, but the one format that has been stable this whole time has been ASCII. It's also the format that is likely to survive the longest without change. Project Gutenberg texts can now be read on every e-reader, smartphone, tablet and PC.

If you want to use Rich Text format, or XML, or PostScript or something else then fine - please do. But don't go trying to deprecate ASCII.

Re:Project Gutenberg

[shutdown -p now]

If you want to use Rich Text format, or XML, or PostScript or something else then fine - please do. But don't go trying to deprecate ASCII.

This is false dichotomy. Plain text can be non-ASCII, and ASCII doesn't necessarily imply plain text. All the formats you've listed allow to add either visual or semantic markup to text, whereas ASCII is simply a way to encode individual characters from a certain specific set. They do not propose to move to rich text for coding, but to move away from ASCII.

There are still many reasonable arguments against it, but this isn't one of them.

Re:Project Gutenberg

[pz]

When I was a young graduate student building my first experimental setup, a professor who was older and wiser than me suggested that data should be saved in ASCII whenever possible because space was relatively inexpensive and time is always scarce. Although I thought that a bit odd, I did follow his advice.

The result? I can use almost any editor to read my data files from the very start of my career, closing in on 30 years ago. Just this past week, that was an important factor in salvaging some recently-collected data. In contrast, I can't always read the MS Word files -- an example of an extended character set -- from even a few years ago, and I sure as hell can't view them in almost any editor. Sure, with enough time, I can or could, figure out how to read them, but, as the wise professor rightly pointed out, time is scarce.

Thus, compatibility is important, and the most compatible data and document format is human-readable plain ASCII.

Learn2code

[santax]

I can express my intentions just fine with ASCII. They have cunningly invented a system for that. It's called language and it comes in very handy. The only thing I would consider missing is a pile of shit-character. I could use that one right now.

It ain't broke!

[webbiedave]

Let's take our precious time on this planet to fix what's broken, not break what has clearly worked.

This is nonsense

[Kohath]

Programming languages usually have too much syntax and too much expressiveness, not too little. We don't need them to be even more cryptic and even more laden with hidden pitfalls for someone who is new, or imperfectly vigilant, or just makes a mistake.

If anything, programming needs to be less specific. Tell the system what you're trying to do and let the tools write the code and optimize it for your architecture.

We don't need longer character sets. We don't need more programming languages or more language features. We need more productive tools, software that adapts to multithreaded operation and GPU-like processors, tools that prevent mistakes and security bugs, and ways to express software behavior that are straightforward enough to actually be self-documenting or easily explained fully with short comments.

Focusing on improving programming languages is rearranging the deck chairs.

Re:huh

[MightyYar]

so we should start coding in Chinese?

Exactly! Keep the "alphabet" small, but the possible combination of "words" infinite.

You don't need a glyph for "=>" for instance. Anyone who knows what = and > mean individually can discern the meaning.

And further (I know, why RTFA?):

But programs are still decisively vertical, to the point of being horizontally challenged. Why can't we pull minor scopes and subroutines out in that right-hand space and thus make them supportive to the understanding of the main body of code?

This is easily done with a split screen, and sounds like an editor feature to me. Not sure why you'd want a programming language that was tied to monitor size and aspect ratio.

Why not make color part of the syntax? Why not tell the compiler about protected code regions by putting them on a framed light gray background? Or provide hints about likely and unlikely code paths with a green or red background tint?

Again, if you want this, do it in the editor. Doesn't he know anyone who is colorblind? And even a normally sighted user can only differentiate so many color choices, which would limit the language. And forget looking up things on Google: "Meaning of green highlighted code"... no wait "Meaning of hunter-green highlighted code" hmmmm... "Meaning of light-green highlighted code"... you get the idea.

ASCII art is cool!

[Joe The Dragon]

ASCII art is cool!

Author seems to be high or something

[Tridus]

He comes up with a bunch of ideas at the end that are out to lunch. Let's take a look:

Unicode has the entire gamut of Greek letters, mathematical and technical symbols, brackets, brockets, sprockets, and weird and wonderful glyphs such as "Dentistry symbol light down and horizontal with wave" (0x23c7). Why do we still have to name variables OmegaZero when our computers now know how to render 0x03a9+0x2080 properly?

Well, let's think. Possibly because nobody knows what 0x03a9+0x2080 does without looking it up, and nobody seeing the character it produces would know how to type said character again without looking it up? I know consulting a wall-sized "how to type X" chart is the first thing I want to do every 3 lines of code.

While we are at it, have you noticed that screens are getting wider and wider these days, and that today's text processing programs have absolutely no problem with multiple columns, insert displays, and hanging enclosures being placed in that space? But programs are still decisively vertical, to the point of being horizontally challenged. Why can't we pull minor scopes and subroutines out in that right-hand space and thus make them supportive to the understanding of the main body of code?

If you actually look at word processing programs, the document is also highly vertical. The horizontal stuff is stuff like notes, comments, revisions, and so on. Putting source code comments on the side might be a useful idea, but putting the code over there won't be unless the goal is to make it harder to read. (That said, widescreen monitors suck for programming.)

And need I remind anybody that you cannot buy a monochrome screen anymore? Syntax-coloring editors are the default. Why not make color part of the syntax? Why not tell the compiler about protected code regions by putting them on a framed light gray background? Or provide hints about likely and unlikely code paths with a green or red background tint?

So anybody who has some color-blindness (which is not a small number) can't understand your program? Or maybe we should make a red + do something different then a blue +? That's great once you do it six times, then it's just a mess. (Now if you want to have the code editor put protected regions on a framed light gray background, sure. But there's nothing wrong with sticking "protected" in front of it to define what it is.) It seems like he's trying to solve a problem that doesn't really exist by doing something that's a whole lot worse.

Would it be less tedious to have 10,000+ keys?

[Sycraft-fu]

Because that's what you find in JIS X 0213:2000. Even if you simplify it to just what is needed for basic literacy, you are talking 2000 characters. If you have that many characters your choices are either a lot of keys, a lot of modifier keys, or some kind of transliteration which is what it done now. There is just no way around this. You cannot have a language that is composed of a ton of glyphs but yet also have some extremely simple, small, entry system.

You can have a simple system with few characters, like we do now, but you have to enter multiple ones to specify the glyph you want. You could have a direct entry system where one keypress is one glyph, but you'd need a massive amount of keys. You could have a system with a small number of keys and a ton of modifier keys, but then you have to remember what modifier, or modifier combination, gives what. There is no easy, small, direct system, there cannot be.

Also, is it any more tedious than any Latin/Germanic language that only uses a small character set? While you may enter more characters than final glyphs, do you enter more characters than you would to express the same idea in French or English?

Re:Would it be less tedious to have 10,000+ keys?

[TheLink]

So how are you going to tell the difference between:
a) a hyphen
b) a dash
c) a minus sign

And worse the different unicode versions of hyphens and dashes:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyphen#Unicode
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#Common_dashes

Yes, there's more than one unicode hyphen and dash! There are plenty of confusing characters like that too.

So for programming you're still going to have to stick to a subset for keywords and symbols, and not use the full "tons of glyphs". Or at least you're going to need an entry system that allows you to switch.

Maybe that Poul guy just wants a few extra symbols for some stuff. Good luck with that, many already complain about perl :).

it's not ASCII to blame

[lkcl]

the point has been entirely missed, and blame placed on ASCII [correlation is not causation]. when you look at the early languages - FORTH, LISP, APL, and later even Awk and Perl, you have to remember that these languages were living in an era of vastly less memory. FORTH interpreters fit into 1k with room to spare for goodness sake! these languages tried desperately to save as much space and resources as possible, at the expense of readability.

it's therefore easy to place blame onto ASCII itself.

then you have compiled languages like c, c++, and interpreted ones like Python. these languages happily support unicode - but you look at free software applications written in those languages and they're still by and large kept to under 80 chars in length per line - why is that? it's because the simplest tools are not those moronic IDEs; the simplest programming tools for editing are straightfoward ASCII text editors: vi and (god help us) emacs. so by declaring that "Thou Shalt Use A Unicode Editor For This Language" you've just shot the chances of success of any such language stone dead: no self-respecting systems programmer is going to touch it.

not only that, but you also have the issue of international communication and collaboration. if the editor allows Kanji, Cyrillic, Chinese and Greek, contributors are quite likely to type comments in Kanji, Cyrillic, Chinese and Greek. the end-result is that every single damn programmer who wants to contribute must not only install Kanji, Cyrillic, Chinese and Greek unicode fonts, but also they must be able to read and understand Kanji, Cyrillic, Chinese and Greek. again: you've just destroyed the possibility of collaboration by terminating communication and understanding.

then, also, you have the issue of revision control, diffs and patches. by moving to unicode, git svn bazaar mercury and cvs all have to be updated to understand how to treat unicode files - which they can't (they'll treat it as binary) - in order to identify lines that are added or removed, rather than store the entire file on each revision. bear in mind that you've just doubled (or quadrupled, for UCS-4) the amount of space required to store the revisions in the revision control systems' back-end database, and bear in mind that git repositories such as linux2.6 are 650mb if you're lucky (and webkit 1gb) you have enough of a problem with space for big repositories as it is!

but before that, you have to update the unix diff command and the unix patch command to do likewise. then, you also have to update git-format-patch and the git-am commands to be able to create and mail patches in unicode format (not straight SMTP ASCII). then you also have to stop using standard xterm and standard console for development, and move to a Unicode-capable terminal, but you also have to update the unix commands "more" and "less" to be able to display unicode diffs.

there are good reasons why ASCII - the lowest common denominator - is used in programming languages: the development tools revolve around ASCII, the editors revolve around ASCII, the internationally-recognised language of choice (english) fits into ASCII. and, as said right at the beginning, the only reason why stupid obtuse symbols instead of straightforward words were picked was to cram as much into as little memory as possible. well, to some extent, as you can see with the development tools nightmare described above, it's still necessary to save space, making UNICODE a pretty stupid choice.

lastly it's worth mentioning python's easy readability and its bang-per-buck ratio. by designing the language properly, you can still get vast amounts of work done in a very compact space. unlike, for example java, which doesn't even have multiple inheritance for god's sake, and the usual development paradigm is through an IDE not a text editor. more space is wasted through fundamental limitations in the language and the "de-facto" GUI development environment than through any "blame" attached to ASCII.

Re:huh

[ScrewMaster]

diagrammatic is simply a fucking pain in the ass.

Amen.

Every scientist I've ever met that had any experience writing code vastly prefers the C based LabWindows to the diagrammatic LabView

Well, I'm not a scientist, just a humble software engineer, and back in my contract coding days I was always faced by managers that would try to push me to use LabView. They had this mistaken belief that because it was "visual" they could a. understand it and b. thought it was simpler and c. thought I should charge less if I used it.

I told them that a. it's still programming, and beyond a certain level of complexity understanding still requires sufficient knowledge and b. refer to a. and c. if they were going to force me to waste time fighting such an environment up 'til the point where I found something critical that it couldn't do (such as run fast enough) and would end up re-coding the right way anyway, they damn well weren't going to pay me less.

Re:huh

[tftp]

it might be fully resonable to have classes related to financial years (finansår), close of year (årsavslutning), the tax report (årsoppgave) and so on.

And one day the code is sold to China or India, and then people there can't even find a way to enter the glyph. Same if a visiting programmer has to work on the code, or if you need to send a class to another country for some reason.

How far Linux would get if Linus decided to use Finnish (or Swedish) words written with all the proper UNICODE characters for all the variables and types?

Re:Yes, Unicode is "the new black"

[icebraining]

I'm Portuguese and our language uses accents, but if I ever get a source code file with accents in variable names I'll insult the person. Writing with accents in programming serves absolutely no purpose and it only causes problems. It's slower (two key presses instead of one), it's less compatible, it can be troublesome if I need to send the code to someone without accents in the keyboard, etc.

In fact, not only I disagree with accents in programming, but I prefer writing all the names in English. Where would OSS be if all the Gnome devs had to learn Spanish to contribute to De Icaza's code, or Finnish to contribute to Linux?

Re:visual GUI-based programming

[santax]

Visual programming isn't big for the same reason people talk and not use drawings to communicate in day to day life. A decent well explained and understood language is faster, universal and more convenient. Drawings are used in situations where you can't communicate true a spoken or written language. As a replacement tool. It's very basic since with a spoken or written language you can uniformly have so much more precise interpretation of your intentions. Same goes for visual programming at this moment in time. I won't say there isn't a future for it, but as a replacement tool for the tried and tested programming environments it has a long way to go. Come up with a visual programming system for writing actually sophisticated code and you might have yourself a winner. Only party that comes in mind is Labview from NI.