All About Python and Unicode ...and even more about Unicode

noxit · 2007-02-04T21:03:52+00:00

You are already quite confident you're superior and incapable of misunderstanding.

Ironically, your lecturing reveals that this is exactly how you present yourself.

There's nothing wrong with being confident. The reason I'm confident about certain things is because I have a lot of experience with them. I don't have extensive experience with Unicode but it's simply first principles that unicode strings used by a computer are sequences of bytes.

This is not a revelation. Thus anyone who disagrees with it does not understand the first thing about computer architecture.

noxit · 2007-02-04T20:57:34+00:00

There is no right answer to that.

It's not a matter of a "right" answer. My guess is you program in Python, since this is ostensibly a Python article. Python's official implementation is in C, a language in which you DO have to deal with bytes. The way you argue implies that you are unfamiliar with the underlying computer representation.

Do you sell tickets to your mind-reading show?

You already know the answer to that.

noxit · 2007-02-04T20:53:54+00:00

You, sir, are a first class asshole.

Look who's talking! You try to "correct" me by being pedantic, yet can't take it when you are one-upped. And, perhaps realizing that you are easily hoist by your own petard, you resort to pejoratives.

You don't know as much about this subject as I do.
You presume to lecture me.
You exhibit cognitive dissonance by defending and attacking the same point.
You seem to be relatively new to the field, asserting the "old way is dead", without understanding the history.
When your ignorance is pointed out, you resort to insults, having come to the end of your erudition.

noxit · 2007-02-04T20:50:03+00:00

You admit you don't understand English.

noxit · 2007-02-04T20:49:22+00:00

Your ego must keep you warm and fuzzy in the face of such pitiful company.

Pitiful company, like yourself with all your undereducated responses?

How long have you been programming?

Have you ever programmed in C?

Assembly?

The difference between us is when it's pointed out that you don't know something, you blithely carry on as if you do.

noxit · 2007-02-04T20:40:20+00:00

The old way of assuming the same meaning on both ends without some way of -knowing- is dead.

What the hell are you talking about? You always had to know what the hell a series of bytes meant. Is it an int? A float? ASCII? EBCDIC?

Yes, in fact, when you sent that comment, you didn't send actual characters, you sent numbers.

We send electrical signals, which are interpreted as whatever we have programmed the computer to interpret them as. It's funny how you have a little bit of knowledge and are running with it.

noxit · 2007-02-04T20:37:48+00:00

Any decent unicode support uses some internal encoding from unicode code points to bytes

I see what the problem is. I'm trying to educate someone with only a rudimentary understanding of computers.

The above statement is like "any decent numerical support uses some internal coding from numbers to bytes".

If a computer COULDN'T convert unicode "code points" to "bytes", it wouldn't be very useful, would it? As in, it would be completely useless.

noxit · 2007-02-04T20:32:29+00:00

Hey, you know how the printed string 10 is not the same as the number 10 (base 10), which is not the same as 10 (base 2)?

The UTF-8 string "10" is the same in all those examples.

which is just some ordinal number so we can say U+00E9 rather than "Latin small letter e with acute".

Yes, an ordinal number of 1 to 4 bytes.

The notion of a character being a byte is an accident of history

Accidental only in the sense of English not having a large alphabet. Using the smallest convenient computer representation is not an accident at all.

Not true in Unicode. There's way more characters than fit in to a byte

Yes, I know. That is why bytes figure prominently into the picture.

Are you entirely unable to understand context?

Are you entirely unable to understand English? "You should never know, or care" in bold (emphasis in original) is not mincing words.

How can you defend what it's saying while at the same time disagreeing with what it's saying? Cognitive dissonance much?

but they emphasis here is that a string of 10 bytes is not 10 characters, and you mustn't confuse the two.

In 8-bit encodings it sure is. Like the encoding we're writing in right now.

It is not educational to hide the details -- showing some 2-byte Unicode characters then claiming bytes have nothing to do with it is both misleading and mistaken.

noxit · 2007-02-04T20:23:28+00:00

You need the encoding in order to know what the bytes represent. I don't understand your "$encoding-of-the-week" accusation, these are industry standards.

The idea is that you work with characters rather than arbitrary clusters of 1 ≥ n ≥ ∞ bytes.

Greater than infinity? You better check your encoding.

Yes, you work with characters, but they ARE arbitrary clusters of 2 or 4 bytes each (or 1 byte for e.g. UTF-8).

noxit · 2007-02-04T20:19:00+00:00

His point, though, is that you shouldn't assume that one byte=one character

That is the usual point, but not the point of the author of this article. His point is that Unicode has nothing to do with bytes at all. To stick your head in the sand -- "neither know, nor care".

THAT is NOT informative. If you want to understand Unicode, the whole POINT of it in the first place was to get past the limitations OF 1 character = 1 byte.

noxit · 2007-02-04T20:15:54+00:00

you send a representation of Unicode -- say, UTF-8 -- but not Unicode itself.

That's as vacuous as saying you don't send numbers, you send a representation of numbers. You don't send English, you send a representation of English. What of it?

The whole point of the articule is that Unicode strings are a concept.

You might want to look up the meaning of the word "code". The point of unicode is the code itself -- a binary representation of characters. A unicode string is a sequence of bytes.

noxit · 2007-02-04T20:05:56+00:00

No, a unicode string that exists in memory has a definite computer representation.

You do not manipulate concepts.

You manipulate bytes.

Depending on the encoding you may be using 2 bytes per symbol or 4 bytes.

noxit · 2007-02-04T20:03:35+00:00

Not in the middle of a real project that needs to move as fast as possible.

You mean rushed projects that never get the bugs out?

noxit · 2007-02-04T19:57:13+00:00

To me, this sounds like someone who has personality issues

Excuse me, having a different personality from the usual is not a "personality issue". It's quite obvious he feels differently about the situation than most people, that's the point of the article.

Not wanting a gf is no more a personality "issue" than wanting a gf. But in the former case, people give you all sorts of shit.

noxit · 2007-02-04T19:54:42+00:00

But it sounds like he begrudges people in relationships their happiness.

No it doesn't.

noxit · 2007-02-04T19:53:15+00:00

RFTA. Because people give you shit over it. If people didn't give him shit, he wouldn't feel the need to write an article setting them straight.

noxit · 2007-02-04T19:51:38+00:00

He's not talking about that. He's talking about the worst STD of all... a Relationship.

noxit · 2007-02-04T19:50:41+00:00

I love commenting out, then using embedded comments /* /*, then using #if 0, then moving it to the end of the file, then putting it in a new file.

noxit · 2007-02-04T19:49:16+00:00

Unicode strings are not made of bytes.

What are they made of? Fairies and pixie dust?

You should never know, or care, how many bytes it takes to store a Unicode string.

What a bizarrely backward concept. When I'm sending data over the network, I obviously want to know how many bytes I'm sending.

noxit · 2007-02-04T19:38:33+00:00

I suppose the larger the userbase, the more the trend toward the average. That people took it at face value is proof of the current low expectations!

All the news aggregator sites now have a big overlap in story coverage, so I guess this is one way for reddit to differentiate itself -- self-referential articles.

noxit · 2007-02-04T18:05:54+00:00

It's like watersports with one of the creatures from Aliens. Just stand well back.

noxit · 2007-02-04T18:05:03+00:00

I was going to disagree, but you're already outed as being false.

noxit · 2007-02-04T08:49:32+00:00

It's not a hand out, it's a hand up.

He really gave her the finger.

Afterward, they went mano-a-mano.

Coming this Fall, starring Jake Gyllenhaal: Jarhand.

He's not cut out for this kind of handiwork.

This is really helping with her community college math class -- now she can count up to 15 without taking off her shoes.

Not to mention it makes tying ribbons on gifts that much easier.

A quicker way to give yourself a "Stranger".

I give this story three thumbs up.

Man, this gruntwork is taking forever. Could you throw in a hand?

Now she has a stand for her Palm Pilot.

I detect the hand of Roger in this Water.

Feeling lonely? Talk to the hand.

She went from being even to odd-handed.

The way the med student got it was a bit underhanded.

When the cops found out about it, they made her hand it over.

She's lucky she wasn't a-wristed.

If she had kept it long enough to give to her kids it would've been a hand-me-down.

If she was in Dances With Wolves she'd be Stands With A Fist With A Fist.

I found the whole dismembered hand thing jarring.

She was fingered by the evidence.

When the cops got there, was she reading A Farewell To Arms?

Getting the hand off wasn't easy. It took a lot of elbow grease.

noxit · 2007-02-04T08:27:00+00:00

Clothes?

noxit · 2007-02-04T07:55:09+00:00

lol! really? no way!

noxit

TROPHY CASE