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by Factory
614 days ago
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"The vast majority of the population does not read or write any English in their day to day lives."
This is doubtful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...
While English speakers are not a majority, it is the most popular language.
And one should also note that given English is the lingua franca of programming, I'd suspect that English as a second language is actually a majority for programmers.
So any code that deals solely with programmers as users can easily just use standard ASCII as default, and never see any problems. |
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That is the number of English-speaking people, as in people who can speak English. Not necessarily people who use it every day. In any case, ASCII only works for a subset of even English if you ignore all loan words and diacritics in things like proper names.
> So any code that deals solely with programmers as users can easily just use standard ASCII as default, and never see any problems.
That would not be much code at all, given that most code deals with user interfaces or user-provided data. That is the point: it’s not because the code is in basic English simplified enough to fit in ASCII that you can ignore Unicode and don’t need to consider text encoding.