• atheken@programming.dev
    ·
    1 year ago

    Unicode is thoroughly underrated.

    UTF-8, doubly so. One of the amazing/clever things they did was to build off of ASCII as a subset by taking advantage of the extra bit to stay backwards compatible, which is a lesson we should all learn when evolving systems with users (your chances of success are much better if you extend than to rewrite).

    On the other hand, having dealt with UTF-7 (a very “special” email encoding), it takes a certain kind of nerd to really appreciate the nuances of encodings.

    • JackbyDev@programming.dev
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Unrelated, but what do you think (if anything) might end up being used by the last remaining reserved bit in IP packet header flags?

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_bit

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Protocol_version_4#Header