One fine day in January 2017 I was reminded of something I had half-noticed a few times over the previous decade. That is, younger hackers don’t know the bit structure of ASCII and the meaning of the odder control characters in it.
This is knowledge every fledgling hacker used to absorb through their pores. It’s nobody’s fault this changed; the obsolescence of hardware terminals and the near-obsolescence of the RS-232 protocol is what did it. Tools generate culture; sometimes, when a tool becomes obsolete, a bit of cultural commonality quietly evaporates. It can be difficult to notice that this has happened.
It does not make sense to have a string without knowing what encoding it uses. You can no longer stick your head in the sand and pretend that “plain” text is ASCII.
I have been working on another post recently, also related to division, but I wanted to address a comment I got from several people on the previous division article. This comment invariably follows a lot of articles on using math to do things with chars and shorts. It is: “why are you doing all of this when you can just use a lookup table?”
Most programmers have an intimate understanding of CPUs and sequential programming because they grow up writing code for the CPU, but many are less familiar with the inner workings of GPUs and what makes them so special.
In this post, I'll try to explain why I find most config formats frustrating to use and suggest that using a real programming language (i.e. general purpose one, like Python) is often (but not always) a feasible and more pleasant alternative for writing configs.
Browsing corpora of Interlinearized glossed texts with an adaptable web interface - GitHub - sylvainloiseau/Rest4Interlinear: Browsing corpora of Interlinearized glossed texts with an adaptable web interface