How iconographic characters fit into an alphabet is a matter of much debate, but technically we need only concern ourselves with the complete lexicon.
Be they ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics or modern English letters we as programmers fortunately need only work with the complete set of symbols and leave the semantic integrity of each string to linguists. ASCII, EBCIDIC, ANSII UNICODE and others are simply systems of assigning numeric values to each symbol in scope, but not all systems are created equal.
On Windows, we typically work with UNICODE which is a UTF 16 variant, but other code pages are certainly possible. I have actually worked on an EBCIDIC application for Windows, but I think my chemotherapy drugs were less painful
Sent from Surface Pro
From: Sinha Prokash
Sent: Friday, March 06, 2015 11:27 PM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Yeah, All these were explained by Fred Brooks while we were at it, learning the architecture evolution. Decimal computer to Binary computer. Punch card and paper tape machines dictated coding techniques etc …
IIRC, the main take away from that was space that would take for binaries, and the underlying market language(s). Memory was at a premium.
I’m not a language expert, Peter might be the right person. But I guess some Chinese language has the largest alphabet. And not sure if UNICODE is the right design either, sorry for being ignorant here :). I would not be surprised if something again come to play a major role in settling for yet another coding system.
Of hand, I don’t remember the language ( actually a powerful one), that solely relied on tabs/spaces to define scope.
That is why it is interesting topic !
Pro
From: xxxxx@gmail.com
To: xxxxx@lists.osr.com
Subject: RE: [ntdev] string escape in wdk
Date: Thu, 5 Mar 2015 10:09:01 -0800
That’s interesting.
Thanks for the history there, Tim.
mm
-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com [mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of Tim Roberts
Sent: Thursday, March 05, 2015 10:04 AM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: Re: [ntdev] string escape in wdk
Prokash Sinha wrote:
> For record, I never saw this. But way back when there were few other
> languages fighting to get the main stage, I know there were languages
> that does not want to have any notion of scope based on { } or ( ) or
> or some such, I guess ADA or some language wanted just tab ( \t)
> or something. Did not delve into the reason(s), but there was sincere
> ( or not ) thoughts about those special char being not necessary !
Many bizarre choices have been made over the years. When Control Data implemented Algol 60, for inexplicable reasons, they decided all of the keywords had to be surrounded with single quotes:
‘FOR’ P := 1 ‘STEP’ 1 ‘UNTIL’ 10 ‘DO’
‘BEGIN’
‘PRINT’ I
‘END’
However, in the limited space available in the CDC’s 6-bit characters, single quote was not a default choice. Their scientific focus meant that most printers shipped with the not equal sign in that slot, making the code practically unreadable:
≠FOR≠ P := 1 ≠STEP≠ 1 ≠UNTIL≠ 10 ≠DO≠
≠BEGIN≠
≠PRINT≠ I
≠END≠
> But EBCDIC ? I thought that was just IBM thing. Does it cover the
> UNICODE or multi-language coding space ? Perhaps it does.
It IS just an IBM thing. It evolved from keypunch punch codes. That’s why, for example, the alphabetical characters are not contiguous. In keypunch land, A-I use a different coding in the 12/11 rows than J-R, and because of that in EBCDIC J is not equal to I+1, and S is not equal to R+1. Also, the lower case letters were less than the upper case letters. That made collating a rather tricky problem, and is one reason why EBCDIC died out.
–
Tim Roberts, xxxxx@probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.
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