Cult-like behaviour [was Re: Kindness]

[MRAB]

On 2018-07-16 00:10, Jim Lee wrote:
> 
> 
> On 07/15/18 16:04, Chris Angelico wrote:
>>
>> You claimed that Unicode was insignificant to many programs. I'm
>> trying to say that a Unicode text string is a vital part of any
>> program that works with text, which is pretty much anything that talks
>> to humans. You keep saying that ... well you keep saying different
>> things, and I've lost track of what your point actually is, but you
>> want a way to... disable Unicode? Or something? And you have yet to
>> give any example of a program that doesn't need Unicode, but still
>> uses text.
>>
>> ChrisA
> 
> Why does this seem so obtuse to you?
> 
> Have you never heard of programming BEFORE Unicode existed?
> 
> How ever did we get along?  It must have been a hallucination...
> 
It wasn't a hallucination, but it was annoying having to deal with code 
pages.

The UK had a version of ASCII that had £ instead of #, France had a 
version that had both that and ç instead of some character, etc, and, 
more than once, someone has posted here code that has ¥ instead of \.

Someone on the Auxlang list used to complain about the alphabet used by 
Esperanto because of some of its letters. He was eventually persuaded to 
try switching to Unicode and UTF-8. He reported that the switch was a 
lot easier than he'd expected (because, as had been pointed out, any 
decent software he was using would already support Unicode, or, if it 
didn't, there would be an alternative that did). After the switch, he 
didn't see those letters as a problem any more!