Text-mode apps (Was :Who are the "spacists"?)

[Rick Johnson]

On Thursday, March 30, 2017 at 9:14:54 AM UTC-5, Steve D'Aprano wrote:
> On Thu, 30 Mar 2017 03:21 pm, Rick Johnson wrote:
>
> > On Sunday, March 26, 2017 at 2:53:49 PM UTC-5, Chris Angelico wrote:
> >> On Mon, Mar 27, 2017 at 6:25 AM, Mikhail V <mikhailwas at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> > On 26 March 2017 at 20:10, Steve D'Aprano <steve+python at pearwood.info>
> >> > wrote:
> >> >> On Mon, 27 Mar 2017 03:57 am, Mikhail V wrote:

> Don't be silly. You don't have to be fluent in a language
> in order for your program to support users who are. All you
> have to do is not stop them from using their own native
> language by forcing them to use ASCII and nothing but
> ASCII.  Of course, if you want to *localise* your UI to
> their language, then you need somebody to translate error
> messages, menus, window titles, etc. I'll grant that's not
> always an easy job.

And thats my point. Unicode may allow my French girlfriend
Zoe to spell her name using chars that are familiar to her,
but Unicode is not a langauge translator. Zoe can still
intuit her name in ASCII, but if she's unable to read
English, Unicode is of no help to her.

> But aren't you lucky, you speak one of a handful of lingua
> francas in the world, so the chances are your users will be
> pathetically grateful if all you do is let them type in
> their own language. Actual UI localisation is a bonus.

A bonus for the foreign user, perhaps, but an onerous for
the developer.

> Now you're just being absurd. Supporting diacritics doesn't
> mean you are responsible for teaching your users what
> they're for. They already know. That's why they want to use
> them.
>
> Diacritics are for:
>
> - distinguishing between words which look the same, but
> have different pronunciation;

I wonder how those poor English readers manage without
syntactical clues? it boggles the mind.

> - distinguishing between different letters of the alphabet,
> like dotted-i and dotless-ı (or ı and ı-with-a-dot, if you
> prefer), or a and å;

Sounds like the "encoding in question" could use a few more
glyphs.

> - distinguishing between words which look and sound the
> same but mean something different;

Oh, you mean like mean people? "In a pale attempt to protect
the homestead, the owner smacked an intruder in the face with
a large metal pail only to become pale as sheet when the
intruder was unaffected by the assault. Do you think the
owner's actions were beyond the pale? Or do all other
options pale by comparison?"

> - and making band names look ǨØØĻ and annoy old fuddy-
> duddies.

So now we've even included graffiti artists in our little
"inclusivity project". My, my... we are so _not_ mean!