HN Explorer

4 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 18.9 ms ] thread
rbanffy
ASCII and UTF-8 are very different things...
stop50
I treat ascii as LUCA. Many derive from ist, but utf-8 is the human of encodings: universal and good enough for 99% of usecases.
Rendello
There's a little more to it. Ken Whistler is the vice chair of the Unicode Technical Committee [1], and he's responding to tongue-in-cheek to:

> I really like the idea of questioning whether or not ASCII should even be taught [...] Wherever in a programming curriculum, text processing/transmission/storage/presentation/encoding is taught, then it should be Unicode text

His point is that it's still worth it to learn ASCII, since the now-dominant UTF-8 has basically subsumed it.

1. https://www.unicode.org/consortium/techchairs.html

rbanffy
It's fair to say ASCII is a very tiny subset of UTF-8. We could retroactively call it UTF-7.