@danderson Who needs word boundaries when you're in dactylic hexameter?

@danderson U+00AD soft hyphen FTW.

I was looking in my old Bell Labs notebooks and found this (handwritten) passage from 1997. It has some arguable points, and I'd probably say much of it differently today (with fewer male pronouns at least), but I found it worth rereading. I was thinking about the book that would eventually become The Practice Of Programming with BWK.

Note that there are whole sentences in this short passage that can't fit in a toot, but the alt text appears unbounded, so grab it there if you care.

@danderson My house in New Jersey had asbestos siding.

The life down under.

@timbray It's amazing how soft and supple the skin on a rhino is if you reach into that fold over their leg. You should only do this with a friendly rhino, of course. My friend was called Poindexter, and he lived at the Audubon Zoo.

@danderson I've been pondering putting a talk together to explain the intersection of the varied forces of nationalism, US-centricism, multiple countries promoting their own agendas, the desire to do better, designs proposed by linguists, and the ultimate need for software engineering. It's a good story wherein good things happened, eventually. People who bitch about Unicode without understanding what preceded it all are just being rude or at best wilfully ignorant.

@danderson In the early days of ISO 10646 and also Unicode I believe, there was an assertion that 16 bits was the right answer (note that we ended up at 23 bits, never mind), completely ignoring questions of all that existing 8-bit data, and the horrors of actually dealing with byte order and all the zero bytes that would appear. UTF was proposed as a way to deal with those pesky folks who refused to submit, and then UTF-8 was finally adopted by those for whom reality existed.

@danderson In 1993 Nathan Myhrvold visited Bell Labs to give a talk. UTF-8 was too young to have caught on yet, and I wanted to demonstrate it to Nathan to get Microsoft on board. But he wasn't interested, claiming they had their own solution to handling wide characters. He didn't want to, and didn't, hear about UTF-8. It was probably too late to change their plans anyway, but the Windows system interface still disturbs me 30 plus years on.

@danderson In fairness, what Unicode is trying to do is put all human writing under one umbrella. The result was never going to be pretty.

The UTF-8 encoded BOM is an offense to engineering.

Dave Anderson (@[email protected])

Oh hey TIL why the UTF-8 byte order mark is the seemingly random byte sequence . It's simply because that's the UTF-8 encoding of U+FEFF, the code point that's also used as the byte order mark in UTF-16 and UTF-32. UTF-8 has no issues with byte ordering, so the UTF-8 BOM is an oddity that shouldn't be emitted. But it exists and is specified because it's what happens if you take a BOM-ful UTF-16/32 sequence and naively transpose it to UTF-8, the leading U+FEFF BOM becomes .

Hachyderm.io (hachyderm.io)

Long ago, I was an angry young man who railed against all the injustices of the world, but now time has passed, I have matured and learned so much more about things, and now I am an angrier old man.