::scr Ramblings of a Classic Refugee or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love OS X

[Chris Devers]

On Wed, 6 Feb 2002, Alaric Snell wrote:

> On Wednesday 06 February 2002 13:15, you wrote:
> 
> > > BER is pretty universally accessible... you can download free tools to
> > > decode it for display
> >
> > I don't need to download a tool to use ASCII.  I don't need to learn a new
> > tool. 
> 
> You just need to learn a new syntax for every file instead :-)

But that's true either way. Working with plain ASCII (or, if you're that
ambitious, Unicode) may not solve the syntax problem, but it still makes
sense for the same reason that writing down a message & sending it to you
would be a lot easier on your part if I wrote it in the Latin alphabet as
opposed to, say, Runes or Hieroglyphics or Sanskrit or Kanji or something. 
Sure, you could walk down to the library and look up how to decipher the
glyphs, and maybe they're even a bit more efficient once you have started
wearing out the path to the library -- it's all about pictograms, man,
none of this phonetic garbage! 

But you hit all sorts of issues there: was the reference guide accurate,
or does it have subtle mistranslations that make it impossible to find any
meaning in what I wrote? Is *my* guide the one that's inaccurate, and
everything I write is broken unless you have the same broken guide? This
wouldn't be a problem if we'd just agreed to read & write in the plain old
Latin / English alphabet. Chances are you already know how to use it --
that or you have some very good manuals at home already, because you don't
seem to have any trouble reading & writing emails :). 

Agreeing on a standard encoding format that is universally accessible,
almost always Just Built In, and which has a wide variety of pre-made
tools for working with it just Makes Sense. Switching to something else
only makese sense if you're willing to replace all that infrastructure --
and you'd damn well better get the encoding & decoding tools right. 
Switching to something else does *not* bring us a whit closer to the core
problem here -- semantic meaning and all that fun stuff -- so you'd better
have some other valid justification for doing so. This isn't to say that a
case can't be made -- Microsoft has made a nice fortune by setting up the
infrastructure to produce & decode binary-gibberish formats with their
Office suite. If that's what you're after, then hey have at it. 
Personally, I'm still not sure it's a good idea. 
 
> Explain why people *aren't* using text for everything. Where is the big push 
> to use textual encoding for images?

Well, duh :)

I don't think anyone here would argue against using the right tool for the
right job. If data can't be adequately described textually -- and images
would surely count, then don't use text! But in a lot of cases, something
"better" is proposed without much good justification, ignoring all the
nice properties that ASCII has going in its favor, waving hands and saying
"yeah but $foo can do it better!" This case remains unproven.



--
Chris Devers

"Okay, Gene... so, -1 x -1 should equal what?" "A South American!"    
[....] "no human can understand the Timecube" and Gene responded
 without missing a beat "Yeah.  I'm not human."