Interesting Items...

[Black Hole]

Been busy.

 

[Black Hole]

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003...-about-unicode-and-character-sets-no-excuses/

 

[Trev]

Some really creative similes, metaphors and threat exaggerations scattered about there.

 

[Black Hole]

It seems to me that the parochial attitude of the early computer industry (ie the Americans) may be responsible for English becoming the lingua franca. Are there any programming languages that use non-English command symbols?

 

[MikeSh]

Amazing. That article feels quite modern, but is actually 14 years old, which in computer/internet terms is prehistoric. I wonder how different the situation is today?

Interesting question about programming languages. Since everything has ultimately to end up as machine code I'd imagine it's quite possible that, say, Korean engineers have tools in Korean. In theory they ought to be able to work on the same project as someone with English tools, but that would probably be harder. It'll depend on the method of operation too, compiled vs interpreted, with the latter being harder. (I'm probably out of date with that now and it's all different .)

 

[af123]

Great article BH, thanks for that.

It seems to me that the parochial attitude of the early computer industry (ie the Americans) may be responsible for English becoming the lingua franca. Are there any programming languages that use non-English command symbols?

Some can use non-ASCII characters in things like variable names but I've never seen that as a recommended approach, even when calling a variable something like Σ or σ would make perfect sense (assuming that you can type them and that any other IDE that might be used to maintain the code in future has no problems with it..)

Bear in mind that even the Freeview standard can't get character encoding right. The EPG for high-definition channels uses native UTF-8 and standard-definition is encoding in ISO-6937 and you sometimes see broken encoding.

 

[Black Hole]

Bear in mind that even the Freeview standard can't get character encoding right. The EPG for high-definition channels uses native UTF-8 and standard-definition is encoding in ISO-6937 and you sometimes see broken encoding.

 

[gomezz]

I spent my whole computer career working with a mix of ASCII and non-ASCII character sets. Which made debugging huge octal dumps a tad more complicated as you need to be able to pattern-recognise character strings in both formats as well as the typical binary values you were looking for (memory addresses, table structures etc). But it did give rise to my favourite four digit passcode 1332 for the ops to keyin without them realising they were being rude.

 

[EEPhil]

The EPG for high-definition channels uses native UTF-8 and standard-definition is encoding in ISO-6937

Now you tell me! I've just been searching the whole forum to find out that it was ISO-6937 - and searching elsewhere to find a way of converting ISO-6937 to something usable in Java. All that just to get an é to display properly [from the EPG data in the .hmt file].

 

[EEPhil]

But it did give rise to my favourite four digit passcode 1332 for the ops to keyin without them realising they were being rude.

I'm confused. How is 1332 rude?

 

[Trev]

+1

 

[MikeSh]

All that just to get an é to display properly

Even I'm not that bored

 

[gomezz]

I'm confused. How is 1332 rude?

Google Fieldata.

 

[Trev]

I just did and still non the wiser. F16 woosh.

 

[gomezz]

In the Fieldata character set 13 octal represents F and 32 octal represents U.

 

[EEPhil]

Even I'm not that bored

It's the irritation of writing some software to provide a small subset of the stuff people have with the CF. I had something that would list the EPG contents of the recordings on the 2000T. Then I recorded the Paul Jones Blues programme from Radio 2 only to find a name looking similar to "C[]ecile" in the EPG (where [] represents a single unprintable character). I just had to correct it... Yes, I'm that bored! (or is that boring?)

 

[EEPhil]

In the Fieldata character set 13 octal represents F and 32 octal represents U.

Aha! Get it now. I liked the character name Francis Urquhart for the same reason.

 

[MikeSh]

OK, not an item but a short (<5 mins) YouTube video (but mostly talk) called
"Why you can't win an internet argument."

It's interesting as it is a similar finding of an Horizon programme from about 30 years ago that investigated how difficult it is to change peoples' minds.

 

[Black Hole]

Seen in Electronics Weekly:

"Manufactured from beryllium copper, its contacts are gold-plated to ensure high conductivity and durability at temperatures from -500°C to +1,250°C."

Neat trick.

 

[Trev]

Just how can they test it at -500 °C?
Would it not become a superconductor long before then and not really need the gold plating? And the gold would have melted before it got to 1,250°C, but the gold would only have a melted substrate of BeCu to plate anyway.