Post by @gaditb@icosahedron.website

2026-07-28 00:20 UTC

Okay if I'm understanding people's responses to the above correctly, I expect this to get an overwhelming (uniform? maybe not?) "Yes": Was a universal encoding that would see a nontrivial sequence of bytes as translating unambiguously to a particular sequence of characters, selected out of a set intended to contain all* in-use characters across humanity, inevitable? (*for practical purposes. E.g. modulo CJK unification, okay skipping until-sufficiently-popular e.g. sitelen pona and other small-use symbols. Also okay skipping (or not) in the hypothetical cases emoji, etc.) This has an open-ended follow-up question :...

Replies (3)

@varx@infosec.exchange 2026-07-28 02:08

@gaditb@icosahedron.website Yeah, it was inevitable that we would eventually come to an encoding that would allow representing most/all characters from world languages, unambiguously. The previous situation is untenable. However, I wonder if you would call the following "a unicode": A container format for text where there is a prefix indicating the character set (and maybe some delimiters, runlength indicators, whatever). A multi-lingual plaintext document would have different parts in different character sets.

Open ##4152435
@gaditb@icosahedron.website 2026-07-28 00:37

... and open-ended follow-up question: In this context: Projects in the... retrocomputing? computational-demake? alt/green-tech? a-particular-subset-of-permacomputing? category, like #uxn or #CollapseOS / #DuskOS -- what options to they have towards non-Latin alphabets? Is "either no non-Latin, or else full Unicode" likewise inevitable? Is there something different they are or could do that could lead to some other option (e.g. different per-language/script versions of their software)? etc.?

Open ##5319897
@gaditb@icosahedron.website 2026-08-03 23:44

https://icosahedron.website/@gaditb/116994738489585358 ^ one person answered "No" to this.

Open ##5319901