="Bill Gosper" <billgosper@gmail.com>
=wds>
Gosper has an annoying habit of using non-ASCII characters I cannot
read, which come out as "?" on my screen. Or maybe they really are "?".
Maybe Warren is alone on a network made of juice cans and string? Alas he's not alone; the entire Internet is made of juice cans and string.
plain ASCII, except for the pi. Haven't we been using ¼ quite a while now? It's just option p on the Mac keyboard.
"Just". As it happens, for work I have recently been dealing with a swarm of pesky bugs with the handling of non-ASCII characters. In complex heterogeneous webs of systems the quantity and variety of crazy things that can and will go wrong is astonishing. For example different computers along a dataflow get configured to use subtly different coding and escaping standards ("a good thing about standards being there's so many to choose from"). For example I've seen a forms where every time you simply refresh your browser each non-ASCII character in your input box gets rewritten into a cluster of ever-more random non-ASCII characters, like some sort of malignant symbolic LIFE mutation. And then some poor users then actually hit the button to submit the form (it being too late for HTTP POST's "official" idempotency to help). So if you are conversing within a work group or something where you know everybody is using identical systems (say all Gmail on Macs or whatever) then you might go ahead and include non-ASCII. But if there's the slightest diversity (eg as with math-fun) garble is almost inevitable, and you should hew to truly plain-spoken ASCII if you want to avoid it. Alas even that's not always easy--ubiquitous know-it-all software is ever ready to molest innocent text with spell-"correction", "smart" quotes and other clever misfeatures. Just a few days ago another list I'm on actually sent out a test message with eleven variant strings in order to experimentally determine just how badly "autoformat" was mangling their threads. What year is this? 2013? I think we now have sufficient evidence: "The idiocy of the computing experience roughly doubles every 18 months."