20
votes
Accepted
What is the encoding used in Git's binary patches?
Aha, it's RFC1924's version of the base85 encoding, which uses 5 ASCII characters to represent 4 bytes (80% efficiency):
static const char en85[] = {
'0', '1', '2', '3', '4', '5', '6', '7', '8', '...
- 447
13
votes
Accepted
Are there historical problems with non-ASCII identifier characters in code?
There are historical reasons for this guidance, that are mainly related to the lack of uniform encoding standard.
Encoding issues
Unicode dates back to the 90s'. Before it became mainstream, there was ...
- 80.6k
8
votes
Are there historical problems with non-ASCII identifier characters in code?
The big problem is seeing two identifiers, and determining just by looking whether they are the same. Capital Latin, Cyrillic and Greek characters for example often look the same. Chinese characters I ...
- 47.5k
7
votes
Are there historical problems with non-ASCII identifier characters in code?
Code style recommendations should always consider what kind of code the team is developing. If you are writing scientific formula-heavy code, using Greek letters and math symbols may make the code ...
- 61k
5
votes
Are there historical problems with non-ASCII identifier characters in code?
Normalization issues
This is just a minor nuisance, but is something that you should be aware of. For many characters, Unicode has several valid representations that should compare equal.
For example ...
- 1,378
3
votes
Are there historical problems with non-ASCII identifier characters in code?
There are problems, and they aren't just historical. Sticking to ASCII is not conservatism, it's prudence.
Unicode is huge and complex. Using Unicode (in languages and platforms that support it) is ...
3
votes
Are there historical problems with non-ASCII identifier characters in code?
everyone has some way of producing a λ, é, or a θ on their keyboard
quickly, like a compose key or a switched keyboard layout
Not really. You have just added some difficulty, setup time or new ...
- 79.9k
3
votes
What is the name of the type of program to produce Unicode characters from ASCII combinations?
The general operation to transform some characters by others is a substitution. The more specific operation to transform an input message in an output of codes (such as Unicode) is called encoding. ...
- 80.6k
3
votes
Differentiating Between ASCII and Unicode in File Spec
When discussing a file format, it is important to be clear about the encoding:
Are we describing the file format in terms of bytes (octets) or in terms of decoded text?
For a binary format, what is ...
- 135k
3
votes
Accepted
What is the name of the type of program to produce Unicode characters from ASCII combinations?
I believe a keystroke composer or a keystroke translator would probably be appropriate terms for any utility which converts multiple keystrokes into individual glyphs not represented directly on the ...
- 11.7k
2
votes
What is the name of the type of program to produce Unicode characters from ASCII combinations?
Most likely this would be the keyboard driver. Your operating system will try to find out what physical keyboard you have (that is what keys in what place). The user can usually choose the keyboard ...
- 47.5k
1
vote
Are there historical problems with non-ASCII identifier characters in code?
There were definitely historical problems with using non-ASCII characters in toolchains until recently. It’s becoming more and more true, though, that UTF-8 with a byte-order mark will just work. In ...
- 1,563
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