Microsoft pulls Office 2010 updates because they're big in Japan. As in, big pain in the ASCII Microsoft has taken down its latest update for Office 2010 following reports the tweak was causing some versions of Excel to crash. Redmond said the KB4032217, KB4461627, KB4032225, and KB4461616 updates, each released on January 2 for PCs running Office 2010, were no longer available. Redmond notes that those who have …
Anglo-Westerners typically have no idea how lucky they are, living inside a tiny english-dominated character-set.
For those who haven't had their nose rubbed in A/ what a bloody PITA non-ascii is, and/or B/ what a massive eye-opener it is for most Westerners to discover just HOW much you've always taken for granted (a != ae, right? text runs left-to-right, right? there's only 3 types of "space" character, right?* and we only NEED to use 2? right?) (hey, the phone's ringing again. "someone should do something about that." ) :
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute-minimum-every-software-developer-absolutely-positively-must-know-about-unicode-and-character-sets-no-excuses/
.
Having said that, it could well turn out to be a simple mismatch in install files or similar at the devops level ;D
[ * ] French people will wattle and say "2!".
"For those who haven't had their nose rubbed in A/ what a bloody PITA non-ascii is"
I get by just fine using EBCDIC ;)
"B/ what a massive eye-opener it is for most Westerners to discover just HOW much you've always taken for granted (a != ae, right? text runs left-to-right, right?"
Just a matter of some luck, the situation would be completely different if computers had been invented in a culture with a different alphabet (Arabic is written and read from right to left, just like Hebrew) or some hieroglyph based notation system like Chinese or Japanese. As far as I am concerned, they are completely welcome to have their own computer systems.
As far as I am concerned, they are completely welcome to have their own computer systems.
Well, they did. For instance, DOS had their set of codepages, 437 was the US standard while 850 was the one used in Western Europe adding ñ for Spain, ç for France, ì for Italy, ß for Germany... The quite common use of text-based box-art these days rendered quite funny here when using any codepage-unaware US-made computer program.
I do even remeber that changing the Windows default locale on XP and older to Japanese magically changed all backslashes to the yen symbol. Had quite fun managing paths... and yes, you guessed the reason for the Japanese locale, nudge nudge, wink wink.
tl;dr this only works as long as each computer system is isolated from the rest, which was true 30 years ago. Not anymore.
>> "tiny english-dominated character-set"
> That would be a Latin-dominated character-set.
No, that would be an english-dominated character set.
Pure ASCII did not provide for non-english Latin characters. No such thing as é or ß or Ö, despite these being good Latin characters. ASCII is english-dominated, exemplified by the need for dancing about special code pages to get non native-english Latin characters into it.
Phff! I'm currently fighting SDL and trying to get it to acknowledge I have a Japanese keyboard plugged in. Neither the YenBar key nor the BackslashUnderline key works. While most of the code I'm fighting with uses CamelCase or lowerCamel, it gets really fiddly trying to enter escape strings.
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