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

Re:The thing with ASCII [COBOL 2.0?]

[Tablizer]

This proposal isn't about giving programmers more power to code, it's about making it easier for non-english speakers who aren't coders to read the code that their programmers write.

COBOL was originally designed so that managers and customers could read it. But in practice they rarely did because programming logic is typically too low-level and requires knowing the technical context to understand by a non-programmer and/or non-team member anyhow. Being "English-like" or grammatically proper didn't really help that goal in practice. This is why the idea was abandoned in later languages.

Perhaps it's comparable to legalese. Making it proper English doesn't necessarily improve readability by non-lawyers. It's still gibberish to most of us without a legal background.

It's not worth-while to slow down production programmers in a trade for the rare case where non-programmers will want to read code for an actual need (not just curiosity). Thus, it's an uneconomical requirement as long as there is such a trade-off.