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Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33!

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Credit: Zeitgeist and Stuff

Poul-Henning Kamp

November 1, 2010

To move forward with programming languages we must first break free from the tyranny of ASCII.

User Comments

 (2)

For a reference regarding the original purpose of the ASCII backslash character (to form /\ and \/ in ALGOL), see Robert W. Bemer: A view of the history of the ISO character code, Honeywell Computer Journal 6(4), pp274-286, 1972.

While I sympathize with your quarrel, the real culprits surely are not character sets but keyboard standards. They have yet to shed their mechanical typewriter past and catch up with digital typography.

   — Markus Kuhn, November 2, 2010

Go allows identifiers constructed from Unicode characters, and the language defines source files to be encoded in UTF-8, not ASCII. The tool chain that 6g was built from has dealt with UTF-8 for close to 20 years (6g is built on top of the machinery from the Plan 9 compiler suite).

Perhaps I'm just missing the point of the article. On the face, however, it seems to be based on an incorrect premise.

   — Dan Cross, November 16, 2010
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