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8 Oct 2024 20:50:37 EDT (-0400)
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From: andrel
Subject: Re: Today's XKCD ..
Date: 7 Oct 2009 16:38:37
Message: <4ACCFC49.3050202@hotmail.com>
On 7-10-2009 1:05, Darren New wrote:
> andrel wrote:
>> I assume you meant 'a character set' in stead of 'computers'?
> 
> I'm assuming the complaint is that the Dutch adopted ASCII for their 
> computers. If it bothers you, don't do that. ;-)

Nowadays with unicode we have a choice, well sort of at least. There 
were times that most displays physically only supported ASCII and many 
programming languages also only supported ASCII.
The problem for the 'IJ' is on the one hand worse than for e.g. the 
eszett because everybody knows it is an 'i' and a 'j' together, and we 
have always used that on typewriters. Now it is easy to add ligatures to 
a font set the 'IJ' ligature is still not often used. Partly because 
many look ugly and don't seem to fit into the font and partly because 
not many people mourn the loss of Dutch culture.
The problem of the eszett (and umlaut) is OTOH perhaps a bit worse 
because the Germans seem to have yielded to American imperialism by 
changing their spelling rules so that German can now be spelled using 
ASCII only.


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From: andrel
Subject: Re: Today's XKCD ..
Date: 7 Oct 2009 16:55:10
Message: <4ACD002A.4020901@hotmail.com>
On 7-10-2009 10:19, Invisible wrote:
>>> Dikjstra's shunting algorithm
>>
>> Why don't you learn that Dijkstra is with an 'ij' that is a single 
>> vowel in Dutch and actually should be a ligature in print, but this is 
>> just another example of how the Americans have destroyed a culture.
> 
> ...he was Dutch?

yes, and we have gone over this already a few times.

> Well, THAT explains why the hell I can't even say his name out loud, 
> never mind spell it. :-P

as for pronunciation try dike-strah http://forvo.com/word/dijkstra/ 
gives one pronunciation, I would probably rendered it slightly different 
for an international audience.
Here is another attempt including his first names 
http://badibulgator.free.fr/Dijkstra.wav

> Apparently he was quite clever though. I only know about him because he 
> apparently invented an algorithm for turning a series of expression 
> tokens into an actual expression tree...

You should also know him because I mentioned him a few times here. He 
did a lot of work in concurrent programming (e.g. the P and V 
operation). IIRC he (or his team) implemented the first interrupt 
routines. He did a lot on designing programs from specification. Many of 
the algorithms he is most commonly known for were originally just 
examples of how to derive a program from a specification. You need more 
proof that thinking about your algorithm and documenting it might lead 
to new insights?


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From: Darren New
Subject: Re: Today's XKCD ..
Date: 7 Oct 2009 17:39:41
Message: <4acd0a9d$1@news.povray.org>
Stephen wrote:
> Sorry Darren I'm just "pulling your plonker" ;)

Oh, I know. :-) There's just a lot of people out there that seem to argue 
Americans went and forced our alphabet on them or something. (And yes, I 
notice it's never the brits, but the americans. :-)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".


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From: Neeum Zawan
Subject: Re: Today's XKCD ..
Date: 7 Oct 2009 18:44:18
Message: <4acd19c2$1@news.povray.org>
On 10/07/09 10:15, Darren New wrote:
> While the Brits invented the first computers, I'm pretty sure the whole
> text processing aspect (and in particular the ASCII I'm guessing you're
> complaining about) was happening in the USA. Not that EBCDIC had an ij
> ligature in it either.

	EBCDIC is American.

-- 
"Modem," said the gardener when he'd finished the lawn...


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From: Neeum Zawan
Subject: Re: Today's XKCD ..
Date: 7 Oct 2009 18:45:08
Message: <4acd19f4@news.povray.org>
On 10/07/09 15:55, andrel wrote:
>> Apparently he was quite clever though. I only know about him because
>> he apparently invented an algorithm for turning a series of expression
>> tokens into an actual expression tree...
>
> You should also know him because I mentioned him a few times here. He

	And he killed GOTO.


-- 
"Modem," said the gardener when he'd finished the lawn...


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From: Darren New
Subject: Re: Today's XKCD ..
Date: 7 Oct 2009 19:33:45
Message: <4acd2559$1@news.povray.org>
Neeum Zawan wrote:
> On 10/07/09 10:15, Darren New wrote:
>> While the Brits invented the first computers, I'm pretty sure the whole
>> text processing aspect (and in particular the ASCII I'm guessing you're
>> complaining about) was happening in the USA. Not that EBCDIC had an ij
>> ligature in it either.
> 
>     EBCDIC is American.

Technically, it's from IBM, as in International Business Machines. ;-)

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   I ordered stamps from Zazzle that read "Place Stamp Here".


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From: smcavoy3
Subject: Re: Today's XKCD ..
Date: 8 Oct 2009 03:26:10
Message: <4acd9412$1@news.povray.org>
When we introduced English to the world we did it at the point of a gun 
and with gunboat diplomacy. The American method was more economic, 
supplying cheap(ish) computer products and English language films. 
Somehow that seems more acceptable to people at large.

__

Stephen


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From: Invisible
Subject: Re: Today's XKCD ..
Date: 8 Oct 2009 04:55:16
Message: <4acda8f4$1@news.povray.org>
>     And he killed GOTO.

Then he did a great service to the world at large.


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From: Invisible
Subject: Re: Today's XKCD ..
Date: 8 Oct 2009 04:57:58
Message: <4acda996@news.povray.org>
>> Well, THAT explains why the hell I can't even say his name out loud, 
>> never mind spell it. :-P
> 
> as for pronunciation try dike-strah.

Interesting. DJ seemed to think the K was silent.

>> Apparently he was quite clever though. I only know about him because 
>> he apparently invented an algorithm for turning a series of expression 
>> tokens into an actual expression tree...
> 
> You should also know him because I mentioned him a few times here. He 
> did a lot of work in concurrent programming (e.g. the P and V 
> operation). IIRC he (or his team) implemented the first interrupt 
> routines. He did a lot on designing programs from specification. Many of 
> the algorithms he is most commonly known for were originally just 
> examples of how to derive a program from a specification. You need more 
> proof that thinking about your algorithm and documenting it might lead 
> to new insights?

Actually, now I think about it, I do vaguely recall looking him up on 
Wikipedia. Wasn't he one of those Ivory Tower theorists who thought that 
you can actually specify what a program is supposed to do 
mathematically, and then formally prove that the program you wrote does it?


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From: clipka
Subject: Re: Today's XKCD ..
Date: 8 Oct 2009 09:11:10
Message: <4acde4ee$1@news.povray.org>
andrel schrieb:

> Nowadays with unicode we have a choice, well sort of at least. There 
> were times that most displays physically only supported ASCII and many 
> programming languages also only supported ASCII.
> The problem for the 'IJ' is on the one hand worse than for e.g. the 
> eszett because everybody knows it is an 'i' and a 'j' together, and we 
> have always used that on typewriters. Now it is easy to add ligatures to 
> a font set the 'IJ' ligature is still not often used. Partly because 
> many look ugly and don't seem to fit into the font and partly because 
> not many people mourn the loss of Dutch culture.
> The problem of the eszett (and umlaut) is OTOH perhaps a bit worse 
> because the Germans seem to have yielded to American imperialism by 
> changing their spelling rules so that German can now be spelled using 
> ASCII only.

UR doin' it wrong.

In the good old times of 7-bit ASCII, we Germans had our own version, 
the "GSCII", where we'd replace some rarely-used characters with the 
German umlauts, sz-ligature and even the paragraph sign. Some computers 
would have switches to toggle between different character ROMs for ASCII 
and GSCII, while printers would have control sequences to activate GSCII.

In the times of 8-bit character sets, we Germans had our own 8-bit 
codepage on the IBM computers (well, not exactly our own - we shared it 
with other Western Eurpoean languages), and our own keyboard layouts.

And no, German spelling has /not/ been changed to "yield to American 
imperialism". We still have the umlauts (with which we didn't change a 
thing), and despite some people believing the contrary, we didn't do 
away with the sz ligature either; we just changed the rules to make it 
easier to know when to use the sz ligature and when not to, and while 
this has effectively reduced the cases in which it is used, there are 
still plenty of words in which it still constitutes the only proper 
spelling.

We have a long tradition though how to deal with cases where the umlauts 
and/or the sz ligature are not available (the sz ligature, in 
particular, has never been available in all-uppercase spelling). /And/, 
as mentioned before, we insisted on /not/ using ASCII, /not/ using 
American keyboard layouts, etc.; so the Dutch "ij" issue seems to me not 
so much a problem of "American imperialism", but laziness on the Dutch 
side to /maintain/ their culture.


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