asciilifeform: anyway the reason to have a sane notion of text and glyphs is not so that coolies can write hieroglyphs but so that one can speak of mathematics.
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: 'text' is merely a subprogram for a program that displays glyphs. any other definition is braindamaged and will have to be paid for, again and again, until replaced with a sane one.
asciilifeform: phf: in case this wasn't obvious, i was not speaking of a ~literal~ return to v6☟︎
asciilifeform: therealbitcoin, as we have it, makes minimal use of gnarly unixisms. but its dependencies (incl. gcc and the toolchain) are another matter.
asciilifeform: punkman: it could work if no one were to ever use anything else. but the distinction between 'this is a binary blob and is to be cut into octets' vs 'this is a text blob and is to be cut into words' would remain
asciilifeform is l0lzing over how we are replacing the asciilifeform vs mircea_popescu debate on udp, with jurov playing the part of asciilifeform and asciilifeform playing the part of mircea_popescu☟︎
asciilifeform: all of them traceable to variadic chars
asciilifeform: where we learned that yes, it is retarded in 1,001 ways
asciilifeform: jurov: so whatchawaiting for, write us a sane diff that behaves sanely on a typical unix box ?
asciilifeform: jurov: go and find the src for gnu diff (it is in the logs) and see how much of the bulk and library load garbage is on account of non-latin.
asciilifeform: so he has a different set of glyphs above 0x80
asciilifeform: say jurov gotta see Žižek printed correctly
asciilifeform: i favour the old msdos solution instead
asciilifeform: because it is inevitably a clusterfuck of complexity
asciilifeform: as a native of what latinate folks regard as likewise a 'hieroglyphs' language, i STILL favour the abolition of 'hieroglyphs display on EVERY box'☟︎
asciilifeform: jurov: witness what unix proggies that try to be 'special encoding'-aware look like.
asciilifeform: but it appears that all of the magic in the world did not suffice to retrofit a non-retarded notion of text onto unix
asciilifeform: see, if symbolics corp. had won the war and the notion of 'character' was not braindamagedly bound to 'octet' - we would not be having this conversation.
asciilifeform: layering workarounds into the canon is precisely how we ended up with ball of shit.
asciilifeform: punkman: i specifically did not include it in my signed copy of 'vdiff' because it is a workaround for people with broken boxes.
asciilifeform: it is what civilized people use when they program a computer.
asciilifeform: jurov: there are specially-made tools for this (see the screenshots on mircea_popescu's www in the phuctor 3-parter article re: what i used)
