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

"Richard Heathfield" <rjh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
Malcolm McLean said:

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

I'm not convinced, Malcolm. What makes you think it's a mistake?

There's no logical connection between the number of bits used to represent a human-readable character and the smallest addressible unit of memory.
Typically bytes are 8 bits and chars are ASCII, so sizeof(char) equals 1 byte, but that's just a coincidence.

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

No, it isn't. For one thing, EBCDIC is used to store a vast amount of data. >
I doubt that there are many such machines without a heavily used ASCII to EBCDIC conversion utility. However if I have one on my PC I don't know where to find it. You can pretty much guarantee that an ASCII file will be human-readable on your machine.

For another, how, precisely, do you represent (in the sense of
"symbolise") the Polish for "represent" (in the sense of "symbolise")
using ASCII? ASCII unaccountably lacks the c-acute character which is
necessary for this representation to be possible.

&c_acute;
or something similar. Readable in English without special software, on in Polish with the right fonts installed.

But you have said yourself that ASCII needs to be replaced by something
that can represent non-English languages.

Yes. If we were inventing the computer from scratch we wouldn't use ASCII. Unfortunately the "cover every glyph" approach has the problem that the fonts are then too difficult to implement, also that keyboards typically don't have the characters. So ASCII has stuck.

--
Free games and programming goodies.
http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~bgy1mm

.

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