I took a closer look at the ASCII table and couldn't find out why it was setup the way it is.
I plan a little RISC V project which is basicly starting from scratch to teach myself everything about computing. So for the purposes of this project I thought why not make a easier-to-remember character table. By looking at ASCII and EBCDIC I noticed that the control characters were encoded at the start of the table. Any logical, non deprecated reason for that?
I made a little text file in which I wrote down my current table. The project would of course translate it back to ASCII or UTF-8 if it's needed.
Currently it starts with the numbers 0-9 followed by the standard latin uppercase letters, then the lowercase ones. The rationale behind this is that the hexcodes for the numbers are the same as the numbers, the letters A - F correspond to the correct hex values as well, making it easy to remember. The start of the alphabet has an offset of 10 and if you want to convert upper- and lowercase you'd just have to know the length of the alphabet, which is 26.
>and couldn't find out why it was setup the way it is. Brainlet
Notice 'A' (uppercase) is 100 0001, while 'a' lowercase is 110 0001. This goes for all the alphabetical characters. This makes it easy: you just flip the 6th least significant bit to go between upper and lower case. Or, if you were to clear the 7th lsb, then it turns A into Ctrl-A.
Both of these things made it extremely easy for early computers and programmers, because both shift and control could be implemented simply by flipping a single bit.
Chase Morris
>I took a closer look at the ASCII table and couldn't find out why it was setup the way it is.
afaik Commodore 64 and Terry rejected ASCII in their system, maybe look at that >I took a closer look at the ASCII table and couldn't find out why it was setup the way it is. you suck at searching then >non-deprecated reasons no, it's for typewriters and only alive for stubbornness and dogmatism of unix culture and backward compatibility preserved forever in UTF-8
Cooper Perez
Good luck having an ascii system where NUL is not 0x00. If you make NUL 0xAB, likely you'll have to change all of your memory cleaning routines to use 0xAB.
Cooper Lewis
This is a very neat observation, thanks for sharing.
Carter Miller
First, you won't be able to use 0 as a null-terminator. Second, you won't be able to write string literals in C. Just stick to the standard my dude, make your life a million times easier.
no, he's a retard and as we see with more complex, non latin characters the same rules don't apply anyhow.
OP it's pointless to try. ASCII is basically baked in at this point and the most popular unicode coding scheme is basically a superset of ASCII (utf8)
Leo Butler
Well as I said, I'm starting from scratch, basicly having nothing but a hex editor and something to convert the 32-bit instrunctions to hex, maybe getting an assembler running from there and also hoping I don't end up losing my sanity in the proccess.
Jacob Edwards
But ASCII and UTF-8 are encoded exactly the same for the first 128 characters.
>no, he's a retard and as we see with more complex, non latin characters the same rules don't apply anyhow. Sure, which is why Unicode is a thing. But the first 128 unicode codepoints are still the same as ASCII. UTF-8 even encodes them the same, while UTF-16 and -32 just use the same codepoints but encode them differently.
Either way, there's no reason to reinvent the wheel here.
Ethan Reyes
WHY DID THEY NEVER TEACH US THIS IN SCHOOL
Zachary Nelson
It's basicly just for myself, so I can remember these things more easily. From the outside you wouldn't even notice the custom encoding running there.
Nathan Young
there is no fucking difference, reading unitialized memory is bug anyway
Austin Lee
An extremely common bug. If he ever hopes to use a library which he didn't code, he's going to be squashing bug after bug (ex: strlen won't work unless he modifies it)
Lincoln Cook
implying someone sane would use nul-terminated strings when doing anything from scratch
Jason Russell
>It's basicly just for myself, so I can remember these things more easily. Print this out and tape it to your desk.
