On 11 Jan 2008, at 11:57, AlgoMantra wrote:
> Computers are cultural artifacts too - the use of the English
> alphabet is almost ubiquitous
> in computing. It is hardwired and encoded, burned into the very
> heart of the device.
Can you qualify that a little more? I'm intrigued, surely at the very
heart of the device is binary representation and boolean logic, and
not much more? As programmers we are more aware of this functionality
than the words we use to describe them (eg. MOD and % are both easily
understood and could be exchanged fairly easily in many languages).
Surely the enormous popularity of ANSI and ASCII to represent the
English alphabet (and not much else) is a symptom of the countries
that have driven (exploited?) the major changes in technology at
crucial times?
FWIW, I'd love to be able to forget what the first letters of ANSI and
ASCII stood for. I really do prefer Unicode at all levels: name,
objectives, implementation. A livecoding language using some of the
more interesting Unicode pages would be great.
☮,
A.
Received on Fri Jan 11 2008 - 12:31:32 GMT