Hacker News Reader

> So you're reading a number and then -blurp- your mind goes "Danish" or "Norwegian" letter?

Yes.

Once you become really fluent in a different script, I find that misuse of it starts to become really annoying.

Before I had any proficiency in a language using the Cyrillic alphabet, if someone replaced say an A with a De (Д) or a W with a Sha (Ш) in an English text, I'd have no trouble reading it. Now, this kind of thing always trips me up and I've heard from several native speakers that they absolutely hate this kind of thing. To the people doing this to lyrics of metal songs in particular: please stop.

If I had to have a guess at why, I'd say if you are fluent in English but not a Cyrillic language, then your "System 1" autocorrects such mistakes to the the closest English word without you noticing. Once the other letters start to mean something, you consciously notice the mistakes as such. (For an example of the mental "autocorrect", did you notice the repeated "the" above? h/t Scott Alexander.)

Same idea with that game where you have words written in different colours but you have to read the colour instead of the word, so if "blue" is written in green you have to read "green". It's incredibly annoying in a language that you know, but really easy in a script/language that you don't know.

Or for that matter, Greek.

It absolutely drives me up the wall when I see uppercase lambdas used for A.

For example, the car company Kia styles their name KIΛ, which makes me think "Kil". Or the monitor company AOC writing it ΛOC.

And recently I've been watching an anime called Aldnoah.Zero, which stylizes its name as ΛLDNOΛH.ZERO. That one is particularly aggravating because the lambda is right next to an L!

ΛOC is the worst for me in Cyrillic, because that is a real word and it means elk.

Naive Danish speaker here. It is really jarring to look at, and is completely indistinguishable from ø. It is not that I cannot infer its meaning from the context, but it just stands out as a typo on first look and is really distracting. It surely would prevent me from using the font.

Good thing Danish doesn't have A through F, or you wouldn't be able to stomach hexadecimal.]

Likewise with O; the commonplace zero with no slash would likely look like a jarring typo also, if Danish had that letter.

Not the same thing; A-F are expected in hexadecimal and thus don't look out of place. I don't understand what you mean with O, font designers usually make sure that there are visual cues specifically to make it easy to distinguish those two glyphs.

> Good thing Danish doesn't have A through F, or you wouldn't be able to stomach hexadecimal.]

Hexadecimal requires being able to identify 'A', 'B' etc. as 'A', 'B' etc. It happens that they're assigned a different value/function then for their alphabetic use. The point is that there isn't another numerical symbol that is easily confusable with 'A'. (Of course there's l33t '4', but the two symbols are pretty distinct in most typefaces.)

tldr; Being able to be used to represent a numeric value isn't the same thing as being easily confused for a different symbol, with a different value that also represents a numeric value.

I don't agree; hexadecimal requires being able to identify A as the tenth element of the sequence of the natural numbers.

Normally, the numeric symbolism that is attached to A is the concept of primality, firstness, not tenth-ness.

Consider: "Grade A", "A-1 Contracting Co.", "Type 'A' personality", "AAA stock"...

A is not just being the usual A in hexadecimal.

Of course, but I'm assuming anyone using hexadecimal understands what the glyphs represent when they're used as part of a hexadecimal number representation.

But the issue under discussion is being able to just do basic discrimination between characters – a necessary first step before associating them with their relevant value (e.g. as the tenth element of the sequence of natural numbers).

So the issue with say, ∅ vs Ø,ø (where the first is a 'slashed zero' and the second two are the Scandinavian letter glyphs, is not (in)ability to assign the correct value in the given context (e.g. alphabetic vs hexadecimal) but in being able to discriminate which symbol it is to begin with.

Now you're talking about Unicode issues, basically.

"zero" and "oh" are in fact the same symbol, just like A is the first letter of the Roman alphabet, and the number ten in hex, and just like a slashed circle is the empty set, the Scandinavian letter, or the slashed zero in computing.

In Unicode, we have multiple versions of some symbols which are dedicated those specific uses; there is a dedicated empty set, dedicated Scandinavian Ø and so on. ASCII already splits the O symbol into a dedicated 0 digit and O letter. Those being different codes allows font designers to play games with styling them differently.

OP doesn't like the fact that in some fonts, the slashed computing zero has a stroke that extends past the boundaries, because then they experience an Ø (zero) vs Ø (letter) crisis. I say, it's exactly the same crisis as O (zero) vs O (letter); just suck it up like the rest of the world.

OP claims that it's "no longer a zero"; but according to whom? There is no standard that the slashed zero of computing must not have a slash which extends outside of the oval. the slashed zero is an ad hoc concoction in computing that fontographers style in their own way. The font I'm typing in now renders ASCII zero as having a dot in the middle. Maybe there is a script somewhere in the world where that looks like a letter; oops!

I agree there could be such a rule; whether a stroke touches or crosses another one is significant. These are totally different characters, after all: 由, 田. In western writing, we don't fuss quite that much. For instance the horizontal stroke of A sometimes extends outside of the frame. The top may be squared off or round.

What do you mean? 0 'zero' and O 'oh' are not the same character, either historically (the characters have distinct origins - with the Roman letter O 'oh' coming from Greek omicron, itself coming from Phoenician ʿayin; and the numeric character 0 'zero' coming originally from a dot notation in India (so dotted-zeros, which you mention using and I also prefer, are nicely appropriate) which eventually 'widened' to a hollow shape, adopted by Arabs and transmitted by them to Europe.), nor in terms of their encoding. But this isn't at all an ASCII innovation: the symbols were historically distinct and in fact have completely different origins.

So 0 'zero' and O 'oh' are not the same symbol. A is really the same symbol, whether in alphabetic use or hexadecimal, but 'means' different things in different contexts. (Even the alphabetic 'meanings' of A/a are not very consistent in English, in terms of representing sounds, and are influenced by context, so that a in cat and a in father don't 'mean' the same thing, in terms of representing sounds.)

To be fair, OP probably isn't actually using the Scandinavian Ø in contexts where it would be confused with ∅ (slashed zero), though in theory I suppose some language might support it as part of variable names etc.

But certainly I get irritated with fonts in which I (capital 'i') and l (lowercase 'L') look identical, as they occur in similar contexts and so increase cognitive load.

[Postscript edit: I was thinking that there is no visually similar character to a dotted zero, but then I remembered what upper-case theta (θ) is Θ, which does look awfully like a dotted zero.]

> So you're reading a number and then -blurp- your mind goes "Danish" or "Norwegian" letter?

Yes, because my native language is Swedish, so I frequently come across this letter.

> Context doesn't come into play?

Would you use this argument against someone that said zero and the letter O are too similar? I doubt it, and I suspect your casual approach to this is based on the fact that you never encounter this letter.

True, 1 d0nt get h0w anyone c0uld f1nd that an0ying 1n a font, when c0ntext make5 it readily apparent that they are letters.

I would imagine that if you speak a language that includes that letter, it would be much more annoying

it's about as annoying as finding the difference between a o or 0.

it's about cognitive load