Comment by crankylinuxuser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crankylinuxuser | Hacker News Reader

crankylinuxuser

I'd posit the idea that we primarily use the punctuation that we find on the keyboard of the device we use.

On Windows/Linux, I use a 101 key. We all know the symbols. And those are the ones I use. There are cases in which I can use an interrobang or kanji-related emoticons, but I'm doing a google search and copying and pasting. But long story short, I don't use these other symbols because they're not easily available.

Sure, I could remap my keys, at least on Xorg. (No clue how to do that on Windows. ) But then, those symbols just aren't used. It's also a reason I don't bother with APL, because the language uses dozens of characters that aren't normally on a keyboard. I'll mess with ones I can type.

Now, phones... Oh my. A phone will auto-substitute picture emoticons from things like :D . Technically, these are a Unicode character set with device implementations. It means even though the pic is a 32x32, it's only usually 2 bytes (unicode is fucky, urgh, so many bugs). I'm more leery in using unicode because of character handling and badness, but things seem to be moving that general direction.

But for the wider issue of Unicode, these "failed symbols" are right in there. But good luck exploring and finding them, since characters can be from 1-6 bytes, or 2^48 space... Alas, back to searching google and copying and pasting.

Primarily.

The major exception for me is em-dashes, which I use all the time.

There are also a few punctuation marks on a standard keyboard that don't get used very much outside of programming and other specialized contexts. {}\|

Another interesting thing related to punctuation is that the use of some punctation is really overloaded. Quotation marks in particular can mean literally quoting someone, a scare quote, an indication that something is a term of art, titles of certain types of works, and probably some other variants.

On some keyboard layouts (including Danish, which I use), we also have the ¤ on shift-4.

Nobody I know has ever used ¤ in any context at all, it seems like such an odd addition. I've used it sometimes as a footnote marker, since it's highly unlikely to clash with formatting, unlike an asterisk.

It is the international currency symbol, added to please Russia that didn't like $ being part of ASCII

We used it instead of õ (and Õ) in teletext system as from all of our umlaut characters (äöüõ) õ is the only that is missing in ASCII.

> these "failed symbols" are right in there

The interrobang and a few other "novel" punctuation marks are there, but many of the examples from the article haven't made it that far, AFAIK. (And probably never will.)

> characters can be from 1-6 bytes, or 2^48 space

It's a minor detail, but Unicode characters are limited to the range U+0000..U+10FFFF, so they fit in 21 bits and require no more than four bytes (in the UTF-8 encoding form) or two 16-bit code units (in UTF-16) in the usual string representations.

(No argument with your original statement regarding what we primarily use, anyhow!)

> Unicode characters are limited to the range U+0000..U+10FFFF, so they fit in 21 bits and require no more than four bytes (in the UTF-8 encoding form) or two 16-bit code units (in UTF-16)

The private use planes U+F8000..U+FFFFF and U+100000..U+10FFFF can be used as the high and low surrogate ranges in a surrogate-pair encoding scheme similar to that of UTF-16. That would give a range of U+00000000..U+7FFFFFFF, which is in 2^31 space. If the Unicode Consortium removed their arbitrary upper limit of U+10FFFF for codepoints, the UTF-8 and UTF-32 schemes as presently defined would naturally fit into this space without needing to use any surrogation. Only UTF-16 would require any surrogation -- its present scheme and those private use planes for a 2nd tier -- but hopefully the use of UTF-16 would be well on its way out by then.

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