IMO one of the pedagogical issues is that people who start with ASCII often assume that the byte-representation (e.g. 0x48) is numerically the same as the code-point (48 in hex and/or 73 in decimal) and vice versa.
This leads to a mental model of:
(bytes which are numbers) -> pictures
That breaks down when you get into UTF-8 which forces people to recognize more steps:
bytes -> numbers -> pictures
And then when it comes to things like code-points that might have no visual representation themselves, but modify others, like accents.
bytes -> numbers -> groups of numbers modifying each other -> pictures
3 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 52.6 ms ] threadThis leads to a mental model of:
That breaks down when you get into UTF-8 which forces people to recognize more steps: And then when it comes to things like code-points that might have no visual representation themselves, but modify others, like accents.2012 (214 points, 75 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3448507
2014 (96 points, 37 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6996500
2010 (61 points, 21 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1219065
2017 (57 points, 11 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13908703