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The Hard-Core Coder

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The Hard-Core Coder

Daily Archives: November 15, 2021

The Blessing of Unicode

15 Monday Nov 2021

Posted by Wyrd Smythe in CS101

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

strings, text, text file, Unicode, UTF-8

Computers process numbers using arithmetic and logic (which amount to the same thing). Processing text, however, requires at least two levels of abstraction. Firstly, a definition of a textual atom — informally a character. Secondly, a definition of a textual unit — typically called a string. A string is an ordered list of characters.

Therein lies a whole field of computer science. From a practical point of view, implementing text has become much easier with Unicode. Different character sets was one of the more awful aspects of dealing with text. (Remember CP-1252?)

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Wyrd Smythe

Wyrd Smythe

The canonical fool on the hill watching the sunset and the rotation of the planet and thinking what he imagines are large thoughts.

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