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Comment by _vbdg | Hacker News Reader

> not having all the characters needed for English

I've heard this argument a few times, and each time it's just as contrived, particularly if you stick to American English. While I'm happy to acknowledge it's not good enough for other languages, ASCII is plenty good for English. Unless you're trying to type cafe with an accented e to be fancy or type that old conjoined-ae character, ASCII is fine for everyday usage. See the fact that most Americans have never installed a separate keyboard layout.

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> While I'm happy to acknowledge it's not good enough for other languages, ASCII is plenty good for English.

It’s good enough for the style of American English adopted as a concession to typewriter limitations, since that’s pretty much exactly what ASCII is designed to support. OTOH, American English as used outside of that context doesn’t use straight quotes, but rounded ones in each direction with different meaning, uses various diacritical marks, and also uses the cent sign (¢), the obelisk (†), diesis (‡), pilcrow (¶), section sign (§), division sign (÷), multiplication sign (×), less-(and greater-)than-or-equals sign (≤ and ≥), angle brackets (⟨ and ⟩, which aren’t the same as less-than/greater-than symbols), the interrobang (‽), and—the next three distinct from the hyphen—the minus sign, en-dash, and em-dash.

> See the fact that most Americans have never installed a separate keyboard layout.

Common software used for text, like MS-Word, provides convenience methods for many non-ASCII characters without an keyboard layout change.

Some operating systems extend this to work across all apps.

Since I know that macOS conveniently allows to type en and em dashes (option+hyphen and shift+option+hyphen respectively) I'm using both frequently in the appropriate situations instead of just putting hyphens everywhere.

I don't see at all how not being able to type certain non alphabetical symbols means it isn't good for English. Half you quoted are general math symbols that have nothing to do with English.

I want you to explain to your grandmother why the software you wrote can handle dollar signs but not cent signs.

FIELDATA didn't support the cent sign either, which my grandmother is much more familiar with, so I think it would not be hard for her to grasp this concept.

> I don't see at all how not being able to type certain non alphabetical symbols means it isn't good for English.

It means that because the English language uses punctuation and other non-alphabetic symbols, not just letters of the alphabet, as an examination of any substantial corpus of written material in the language not solely consisting of material where the writer was constrained by ASCII (and, heck, even those where they were, though the set of non-alphabetic symbols used would be narrower) would instantly reveal.

> Half you quoted are general math symbols that have nothing to do with English.

5 (7 if you mistakenly include angle brackets, which do have textual, non-mathematical uses) out of 15 is not half, but mathematical symbols are used in written English.

This is like saying that a python interpreter isn't good for interpreting python, because frequently python programs might be invoked using a bash script, and so python is incomplete without bash.

If my weird squiggley that I use in my specific niche field isn't represented by any Unicode code point, does that mean that Unicode isn't good for representing English?

Funny you mention American English given the fact that a great many Americans have various diacritic marks in their names. You can make the claim that those names are "foreign" but the most common ancestry group in the US is German.

Regardless of the technical arguments, from the perspective of non-programmers, when they see things like the CA DMV being incapabale of doing things as simple as recording a diacritic over a person's name, it doesn't reflect well on the software industry and programmers as a professsion.

> You can make the claim that those names are "foreign" but the most common ancestry group in the US is German.

While true, I think the overwhelming majority of German-Americans anglicized their names several generations ago. For instance, my great-great grandfather switched from Müller to Miller. This is probably less true of more recent arrivals.

I didn’t know ‘cafe’ was even a thing and wondered what’s fancy about café, so I had to Google a bit. I learned that, yes, Americans do spell ‘cafe’, but the most common spelling still is café. Even https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Café redirects cafe to café.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cafe‘: “variants: or less commonly cafe”

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/essential-americ...: “noun (also cafe)”

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/cafe also prefers to see the accent

That spelling preference may be shifting. I couldn’t find evidence for it, though.

> the most common spelling still is café

Really? The data say otherwise: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=caf%C3%A9%2Cca...

Do you have another source that supports the popularity of the diacritic variant? Rather, café doesn't increase in popularity until after 2000, and thus would appear to be an affectation of sophistication.

I'd hate to work for the New Yorker without ö on the keyboard, but for 99.99% of American usage ASCII is plenty good enough.

ASCII doesn't even have proper quotation marks or dashes. There's a reason software for text production has long made it easy to use characters outside of the ASCII range.

You're talking past OP. Most people don't care about matching quotations or dashes.

Most people will care about something not in ASCII.

Windows-1252 encoding was supported on American computers long before Unicode. I remember “smart quotes” being promoted as a feature of word processors.

Even for people who didn't care for the quotes:

• everyone appreciates ¢, ° for °F or 46° N, ¼, ½, ¾, × and ÷,

• people handling large texts want §, †, ‡ and maybe ¶,

• businesses want ©, ® and ™,

• scientists and engineers need µ, ±, ², ³, ·.

Web browsers have made it more difficult for the average user to enter these characters, but software like Microsoft Word has supported easy ways to insert many of them automatically.

The 'long s' (ſ) was still in fairly common use in English less than 200 years ago. Consequently there are a lot of historically relevant documents written in English that can't be faithfully reproduced using ASCII. This may not be relevant to most people, but it seems plausibly relevant to libraries or archivists (for instance the Library of Congress.)

Example: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/79/Bill_of_...

And that's exactly why Unicode was invented.

It's naïve to assume that American English does not use diacriticals.

I newer saw correctly spelled name of Kyïv (Kyiv, Kiev) city in English texts.

Kyiv is the official form according to the Ukraine government/mapping agency (according to Wikipedia).

The most common English spelling is Kiev. That reflects the English pronunciation. (The British one anyway.)

But many significant European cities with a long history have a different name in English than the local languages: Cologne, Munich, Florence, Naples, Warsaw, Copenhagen, Gothenburg, Prague.

This isn't just Anglophones being boorish and Anglocentric, either. Those cities also have different names in German or, more obviously, Chinese.

Indeed, and naturally British and Irish cities have different names in other (European) languages.

In French: Douvres, Londres, Édimbourg.

In German: Edinburg.

In Italian: Edimburgo, Glascovia, Londra, Novocastro, Dublino.

In Chinese: Jiànqiáo (剑桥) (lit. "sword bridge", Cambridge)

Have you ever wondered why Russians are indifferent to the fact that Moskva is spelled Moscow in English?

Because we don’t really care.

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