Malcolm: Prevent Trojan Source attacks with GCC 12

Posted Jan 15, 2022 10:51 UTC (Sat) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
In reply to: Malcolm: Prevent Trojan Source attacks with GCC 12 by gspr
Parent article: Malcolm: Prevent Trojan Source attacks with GCC 12

As an example of an eccentricity, ASCII has _case_ which is a really weird feature where some of the symbols are available in two varieties with almost but not quite the same meaning, but, it only has case for its set of twenty six Latin letters, not for the digits for example, even though digits can have case, we just didn't bother mapping that and it fell out of use. It's so rarely used, let alone needed for the digits, that Unicode didn't even bother distinguishing either. But case was preserved for the Latin letters despite this.

On the other hand, ASCII lacks the proper quote marks having chosen to go with typewriter-style "straight" quotes to save space, and it can't spell some English words in the conventional way because it lacks accented letters. It is an odd duck. Like C it was probably a good choice in the decade when I was born, but is not The Right Thing today.

Malcolm: Prevent Trojan Source attacks with GCC 12

Posted Jan 15, 2022 11:25 UTC (Sat) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (3 responses)

> it can't spell some English words in the conventional way because it lacks accented letters.

I suspect most native English speakers probably never spelled naïve, coöperate, and fiancé(e) with the accented letters (even 35 years ago when I was in primary school and we all still had to use pen(cil) and paper for ~100% of schoolwork) anyway :)

Malcolm: Prevent Trojan Source attacks with GCC 12

Posted Jan 15, 2022 12:25 UTC (Sat) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (2 responses)

The "coö-" spellings are certainly out of favor (except at the New Yorker). I still use "naïve" and "fiancé". I think "café" is probably among the words that keeps the accent the most IME. Also, "Pokémon" is common enough in certain circles (though probably copy/pasted).

Malcolm: Prevent Trojan Source attacks with GCC 12

Posted Jan 15, 2022 12:37 UTC (Sat) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (1 responses)

Plenty of native English speakers spell that trademarked foreign proper noun without the acute, for a variety of different reasons. (can't input acute accents on their HID; don't care about diacritical marks at all; managed to reprogram their brains to assume (augmented) Latin vowels for any word that isn't obviously English or spelled-by-an-English-person so don't need the accent to pronounce it correctly; are weird half-purist weebs (if they were really purist they'd spell it in katakana); ...)

(In Pokemon fandom you'll even find people who deliberately de-capitalize it on the grounds that in-universe it's a humdrum ordinary word.)

Malcolm: Prevent Trojan Source attacks with GCC 12

Posted Jan 17, 2022 1:18 UTC (Mon) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

> (In Pokemon fandom you'll even find people who deliberately de-capitalize it on the grounds that in-universe it's a humdrum ordinary word.)

Yeah, but *everybody* does that if the title is a common noun in-universe. Mass Effect fans will write "the mass effect" (and I believe the official in-game codex uses this style as well), Portal fans refer to "the portal gun" (its official name is "the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device," and so some fans call it the "ASHPD"), and I have never heard of anyone capitalizing "hobbit" except in the actual title of Tolkien's book. This is completely standard English.

Malcolm: Prevent Trojan Source attacks with GCC 12

Posted Jan 17, 2022 5:41 UTC (Mon) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

It's not just scripts, either. English (and many other western European languages, to be fair) has this really weird feature called "tense," where you have to indicate whether something happened in the past or the not-past, for every single sentence that you write. This is grammatically required; future constructions, for example, can be written in several different ways (using modal "will", using the "[be] going to" construction, just specifying a time as in "Tomorrow, I go to the store", etc.), but every single one of those constructions absolutely *must* be in the not-past tense, and every single sentence that actually takes place in the past must be in the past tense (can't write "*Yesterday, I go to the store"). There are plenty of languages that just don't require a tense, so you don't have to describe when everything happens if you don't feel that it is relevant.