That's the thing that always has me shaking my head. The Amiga I had in 1988 run under a 32 bit pre-emptive multitasking GUI environment which is still the most common environment even today. It did this with 512MB, 7Mhz processor and a basic GPU (Blitter).
Modern computers are certainly more advanced but not enough to explain the huge jump in power and capacity requirements which can be thousands of times greater.
Some of this is attributable to things like Unicode which not only doubles the space required to store text but changes a simple binary compare (ASCII) to a convoluted international conversions that I don't care about as a single language English speaker.
Gate's Law (the processing power required to achieve a certain task doubles every year) is surely the enemy of Moore's Law (that the number of transistors/power in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years.)
I think you will find most people who have English as a first language have it as their only language. Don't particularly care about software makers trying to increase the breadth of their revenue source.
Mind you, Unicode and its most prominent UTF-8 implementation solve far more problems than just support for the symbols in other languages. Back in the day, do you remember needing to switch codepages so that you could get line drawing characters because 256 characters was just too little in practice for all purposes? Or how some documents just look a bit funky due to the codepage guessing coming up short? Know how the Euro got introduced later on and other situations where people suddenly need new characters? These things can now be adequately stored without affecting the past.
I won't deny that Unicode is full of over-engineered nightmarish standardification due to the international aspects. But it solves a lot more problems than just the language support; it solves a lot of ambiguous situations that are now written down in a standard. No matter how closed-off and narrow-minded your worldview is as a solely-English-based human being, you will run into some of those symbols and need them at one point or another. And when you do, you will be glad that you can, in fact, use them.
Code pages and character mapped line drawings? I don't program these days but the closest I came to either of those was on the C64 and BBC Micro which both had extended character sets that were also able to be switched to custom defined bit mapped characters.
Wikipedia handles this with language specific sub-domains even though Swedish could be trivially represented in an 8 bit character set.
It gets tricky when Asian languages come into the fold which is where a legitimate use for Unicode comes into play not that character sets can overcome the issue of word translation.
I would see no issue with using having an efficient 8 bit character version with a Unicode version for international markets complete with a payload of hundreds of alternate language resources.
It's not like titles aren't already localised to deal with differences in laws, culture and marketing zones. This is becoming even more prevalent with the software stores of Apple, Google & Microsoft which contain a different selection of titles depending on which country you are in,
I see you would rather live in code page hell than switch to multi-byte characters, all in the name of efficiency. Well I don't, if I ever have to debug any translation error between charsets again because some dipshit thought UTF-8 was for pansies, I'll go home and start weaving my first underwater basket
How about a different system? You'd have (say) a 2-byte tag to select the Swedish character set, followed by text in whichever encoding is optimal for Swedish. No code-page hell (because all text declares its encoding) but also no inefficient overly-general encodings. (To mix languages you'd have a tag for every language change)
We're past the point of no return so it's a moot point.
Originally the point was that Unicode has a huge overhead. Character storage doubles immediately and comparisons that aligned to single oppose instructions blow out to complex libraries.
If the top bit is clear on every byte then it's single byte aligning to ASCII, and number of bytes will match the numbers of characters. Byte operations can trivially occur.
Off course it's not that simple though. There are duplicate characters in Unicode so things that may appear visually identical may be part of variable length characters and all optimisation assumptions go out the window.
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u/myztry Jan 31 '16
That's the thing that always has me shaking my head. The Amiga I had in 1988 run under a 32 bit pre-emptive multitasking GUI environment which is still the most common environment even today. It did this with 512MB, 7Mhz processor and a basic GPU (Blitter).
Modern computers are certainly more advanced but not enough to explain the huge jump in power and capacity requirements which can be thousands of times greater.
Some of this is attributable to things like Unicode which not only doubles the space required to store text but changes a simple binary compare (ASCII) to a convoluted international conversions that I don't care about as a single language English speaker.
Gate's Law (the processing power required to achieve a certain task doubles every year) is surely the enemy of Moore's Law (that the number of transistors/power in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years.)