Re: Brian Kernighan, maybe I'm not worthy, maybe I'm scum

On Dec 30, 3:34 pm, "Malcolm McLean" <regniz...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"spinoza1111" <spinoza1...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
You have told me, for example, that C is fully aware of international
strings. But when I try to re-use this code in .Net, it can't be
called directly from C Sharp using a String object, because its
interface appears in C Sharp as consisting of sbyte arrays. I fear
that there is no way of converting sbyte arrays to and from two-byte
wide character arrays without an extra loop...although there "might"
be a single Pentium instruction to do so.

The identity of char and byte, with hindsight, was a mistake.

I agree

However it has the good effect that it encourages the use of ASCII, which is
the one de facto universal standard for data representation. Non-English

Not where I worked in China.

languages can be build on top of ASCII, as has happened successfully with
HTML.

Doesn't HTML use double-byte numbers represented in ASCII? Doesn't it
depend on Unicode?

Non-ASCII representations certainly exist, but they risk being
unreadable on some platforms, and in fact they all have weaknesses which

Well, sure, if the platform programmers cut snippets from Beautiful
Code, they will be unreadable.

make them undesireable as replacements for ASCII.

...such as being invented and enhanced by foreigners, as was Algol?


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