Re: Beyond ascii

Shiro Kawai wrote: 
I didn't say _all_ programming projects were done so; of course
if you share code with non-Japanese-speaking programmers, English
is used generally.  My point was that there were plenty of apps
that were made by and used by Japanese and there were no reason
to avoid Japanese characters.  Besides, sometimes it was better that
well-defined Japanese terms were used, rather than badly-translated,
misspelled English were used, in identifiers.


Yeah.  As usual, it's best when you have the choice.

If you are curious about U+FF01 to U+FF5E, just go to unicode.org.
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/UFF00.pdf
You don't need to know Japanese to see the issue here.

Sorry, but I don't see at all the issue there. FF01 is "!", and FF5E is "~", both full-width

To answer why, it's a history.  Once upon a time there was an era
when the gryphs are tightly coupled with character code; especially,
most Japanese characters were displayed twice as wide as ASCII
characters (there were no such thing like proportional fonts).
And somebody thought we might need gryphs for alphabets
with the same width as Japanese characters (that is, twice as wide
as normal ASCII), hence these characters were included.

To me the document looks as if there are Latin, Korean, and Japanese characters, and the usual Western punctuation symbols. Some of half-width, some full-width (funnily, the Japanese ones are half-width, and the Latin ones full-width, which sounds like the opposite of what you're saying). I can't detect any character occurring twice.

--
Majority, n.: That quality that distinguishes a crime from a law.
.

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