Mr. Pike, Tear Down This ASCII Wall!
theodp writes “To move forward with programming languages,
argues Poul-Henning Kamp, we need to break free
from the tyranny of ASCII. While Kamp admires programming
language designers like the Father-of-Go Rob Pike, he simply can’t
forgive Pike for ‘trying to cram an expressive syntax into the
straitjacket of the 95 glyphs
of ASCII when Unicode has been the new black for most of the
past decade.’ Kamp adds: ‘For some reason computer people are so
conservative that we still find it more uncompromisingly important
for our source code to be compatible with a Teletype ASR-33
terminal and its 1963-vintage ASCII table than it is for us to be
able to express our intentions clearly.’ So, should the new
Hello
World look more
like this?”
Source: Mr. Pike, Tear Down This ASCII Wall!
Related Articles: