Re: [Haskell-cafe] Language simplicity

On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 12:45 AM, Colin Paul Adams wrote:

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"Tom" == Tom Tobin writes:

   Tom> readability.  The ASCII characters are universal and easily    Tom> recognized

No they are not. My wife is Chinese. When she was learning pinyin as a child, she asked her father for help with some homework. He replied that he didn't understand them.

I should have said "The ASCII characters are universal and easily recognized *for programmers*." Of course someone who hasn't come in contact with the Latin alphabet, let alone programming, isn't going to recognize ASCII — but I think we'd have an amazingly hard time finding a programmer who wasn't familiar with it, regardless of their native language.