John_Spikowski wrote: ↑Wed Oct 16, 2019 12:02 pm
Heater wrote: ↑Wed Oct 16, 2019 4:51 am
John_Spikowski,
I try to stay away from languages that require declaring and framework definitions.
How does that help in this case?
What does ScriptBasic do when you list the content of directories in different operating systems?
ScriptBasic
directory read is very flexable and produces the same results on all OS platforms.
I looked at the documentation provided and could not determine whether the sort order depends on the LC_COLLATE environment variable setting or not.
From a literacy point of view using only ASCII encodings with ASCII sort order can be understood in about ten minutes. Moreover, when computers work the same simple way for everyone, standardisation is useful and quickly empowers people all over the world so they can work together and share code.
Unicode, on the other hand, does not unify but instead creates localisations that are different for each community. Rather than liberating people, the product is a complicated collating scheme that separates individuals based on ethnic background. True liberation results from people working together, not from the current style of bugs and political segregation based on collating order.
The standard complaint used to push Unicode is that ASCII is English-language focused and therefore not inclusive. Although it's amusing this argument is often written down using the English language, mushing a bunch of different alphabets into a giant Unicode only compounds the original difficulty of having language-centric alphabets in the first place.
In my opinion, the inclusive solution would be to standardise on one all-purpose phonetic alphabet consisting of visually distinct characters suitable for writing down every human language. This should be possible using 8-bit characters because the number of distinguishable sounds people can make, while far greater than cats and dogs, is likely far less than 256. In fact, according to the lead developer of Fido Basic it would only take five additional characters to include the sounds used in all dog languages and one more for cats.
Aside from that, an example of a universal phonetic alphabet comes from the Indian subcontinent. Devaganari works just as well when writing English as it does for Sanskrit, Hindu or Marathi. Although the language-centric alphabets used for Tamil, Telugu and others are visually different, the phonetic structure is similar. In particular, it would not be difficult to create a single phonetic alphabet to handle all Indian languages. Moreover, given the success demonstrated with writing English using Devaganari, other human languages should be possible to cover without difficulty.
Although a single international phonetic alphabet has already been developed by linguists and used to describe every language ever spoken, why standardise on something simple that would liberate everyone using a computer when Unicode also includes the pile-of-poo character? And don't forget, dogs and even cats are people too.