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Propeller Tool not updated?

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  • Heater, I agree that UTF-16 was a bad idea, besides doubling most text it had byte order issues that defeated its use as a universal character encoding. But UTF-8 is actually pretty good. It's basically the same thing as ASCII with extensions to allow embedding any 16 or 32 bit character. While emojis don't seem that useful to me, they're kind of a trivial byproduct of having billions​ of characters.

    It isn't​ perfect as ISO Latin-1 encoded text conflicts for code points 128 - 255 differ by becoming 2-byte sequence with UTF-8 whereas they are single bytes with Latin-1. You also can't randomly index by character into a string, but that's usually not a problem.

    I've also heard that some East Asian languages are larger when encoded in UTF-8 versus UTF-16, but given the complexities of character encoding some problems were inevitable.
  • TorTor Posts: 2,010
    edited 2017-03-19 14:56
    I was a CPM user. And minicomputer user. Always internationally oriented. Never heard about 'langedit', never seen or heard about anyone using it, I have never come across it lately either, while going through all the CP/M history/archive sites on the net. So I will maintain my position that it must have been a very obscure tool.
  • Cluso99Cluso99 Posts: 18,066
    +1
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    Martin_H,

    I agree, UTF-8 is the only way to go for data exchange. Although internally software can turn that into 16 or 32 bit characters as they see fit.
    While emojis don't seem that useful to me, they're kind of a trivial byproduct of having billions​ of characters.
    This is way past trivial.

    Consider the humble "Pile Of Poo" emoji. What problems could there be with that?

    Well, a few years ago Android rendered the pile of poo as a rather disgusting looking blob of excrement with flies circling over it. Which presumably was meant to be an expression of disgust. This was apparently too horrible for some people, so today the same code point is rendered has a kind of happy, smiling little Smile.

    So, even within the same system the same code point has had it's meaning totally changed over time.

    Have a look at the way emoji are rendered on Apple and Android and other systems. The same code point can look totally different and convey a totally different meaning.

    The classic case is the "I feel like dancing" emoji that was rendered as a girl dancing. Or or boy. Either of which may not be appropriate for the sender and received differently by the receiver.

    Now it is proposed that it be possible to specify the gender of emoji to fix that kind of problem. That requires a pre or post fix code point. Also we should be able to change the hair color of emoji, not everyone is blonde, and the skin tone, not everyone is white, right?

    So now any Unicode aware system has to work in color, in high resolution.

    I find it appalling that adult human beings are sitting in standards committee meetings, and injecting sexual and race and other politics into a technical standard for computers. And coming up with such things as the Pile of Poo.

    And what fun kids will have with the proposed "condom" emoji.

    Insanity.



  • yetiyeti Posts: 818
    edited 2017-03-19 20:36
    50(?) more years of emojis and we'll chisel hieroglyphs again in bitmap stones instead of writing using single characters...
  • kwinnkwinn Posts: 8,697
    yeti wrote: »
    50(?) more years of emojis and we'll chisel hieroglyphs again in bitmap stones instead of writing using single characters...

    Hopefully it won't be that bad, but I agree that with a few exceptions they are a waste of time and effort.
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    Can't wait for the animated emoji specification.

  • Good luck selling a phone to teenagers if you eliminate emojis. I think that ship has sailed.

    Yes I agree it's all a big mess though:

    http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/04/12/473965971/lost-in-translation-study-finds-interpretation-of-emojis-can-vary-widely
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    edited 2017-03-20 19:24
    I don't mind that teenagers are illiterate. Historically that has always been true.

    I don't mind that they have a way to send silly pictures to each other.

    What I do object to is all this madness being built into the very heart and soul of every operating system and other software we use. This is serious technical stuff and it being filled with 💩

    Anyone here know how to write a politically correct, internationalized, "Hello world" program in C ?

  • heater wrote:
    Anyone here know how to write a politically correct, internationalized, "Hello world" program in C ?
    If you're an expansionist dictator, even a simple "Hello, world" could rub some the wrong way. :)

    -Phil
  • Heater. wrote: »
    Anyone here know how to write a politically correct, internationalized, "Hello world" program in C ?
    If you want something that will scare people away from careers in programming:

    http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/hello/hello-2.10.tar.gz

    Oh wait, that's not even internationalized is it? It needs to be even longer.
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