> I started in 1934, [... ] At that time, the computing industry was limited to mechanical calculators using the decimal system.
That seems a bit biased toward discrete systems. Engineers and scientists of the time used mechanical and (later) electric analog computers, and they were more powerful than the new discrete systems, for most purposes. For example: Helmut Hoelzer’s Fully Electronic Analog Computer used in the German V2 (A4) rockets
https://www.cdvandt.org/Hoelzer%20V4.pdf (text in German, but has some pictures and diagrams)
this is the most astonishing thing I have read in a long time and I am CS not electrical engineering, so I have no idea what these drawings mean. I speak german, but I hope something works to translate this easily, as it is absolutely crazy. I did not know something like this was possible back then.
It is astonishing how advanced the world was back then...if it wasn't for this use though
I would say understanding of the paper depends more on having an electrical engineering degree than a CS degree. The diagrams look to be electrical circuits and signal diagrams (I am not sure what is the correct term but for example 'Abb. 10a' in the article) mostly.
If you find this interesting and find yourself in Berlin with a bit of free time, the Deutsche Techniksmuseum there has a great exhibit on Zuse, including replicas, actual units of later computers, design drawings, storage units... well worth your time (as is the rest of the museum).
I found out about Zuse because I was tasked with giving a presentation about an important German, when I was taking German classes at the Goethe Institut. Probably bored the hell out of everyone listening, but it was a bit of an eye opener as he's not so commonly discussed.
Strings of unknown length were never in play. The comment was specifically about a separator in a date, which has only 2 potential conventional lengths depending on if you're using a 2 or 4 digit year.
Length can to 2 or 4, month can be 1 or 2, day can be 1 or 2. Using separators makes that easily parseable by both humans and machines, whereas using 0s is just redundant when used on fixed-width strings or potentially confusing when used on variable-width strings.
yes, ü requires punycode encoding. The xn-- prefix indicates that.
And because there are way too many ways to confuse people with similar looking characters, the domains can be typed in and converted appropriately, but some webbrowsers ensure that you notice if something is off with www.bаnkofamerica. com (www.xn--bnkofamerica-x9j. com)
There are a bunch of ideas, like giving different unicode codepoints groups different background colors. That way, а and a show up differently colored.
It's more a UX problem than a technical one, so simple "why not X?" technical proposals tend to be incomplete.
I believe it's also a regulatory problem. Plankalkül on a German site makes perfect sense, because that is a German word. But then there would be millions of ways to form domains that serve no other purpose than misleading the users. So registrars would need to make sure that all letters belong to the same script and make sense i the language(s) native to the domain.
But then this is the internet and greedy and incompetent registrars are a fact, so I am not sure this will ever happen.
As for the UX, maybe displaying a little flag or similar emoji indicating what script it is. And showing a big warning or completely blocking the site of the user has not accepted the script in question. That is for the whole domain, mixing scripts in a single domain should be massively limited and requires other indicators in foreground or background. Also a problem for the color blind.
Windows 11, Firefox. Doing the same on my NixOS install with Firefox (showing the proper url). Seems like a regression if "modern" systems are supposed to be showing that eyesore of a URL, which I get could be a phishing safety thing, but annoying to say the least.
Although HN has translated the umlauted url to punycode for display, it uses the original umlauted url in the anchor's href attribute. Firefox is happy with the href in either format.
This phone runs a rather old FF browser and it works (Umlaut shown) in the address bar. But HN embedded links are shown as raw punycode. Is that a browser or a web page issue?
That seems a bit biased toward discrete systems. Engineers and scientists of the time used mechanical and (later) electric analog computers, and they were more powerful than the new discrete systems, for most purposes. For example: Helmut Hoelzer’s Fully Electronic Analog Computer used in the German V2 (A4) rockets https://www.cdvandt.org/Hoelzer%20V4.pdf (text in German, but has some pictures and diagrams)