Post #3804709
2026-05-10 23:12 UTC
@amy@mastodon.fibercut.org Japanese computers had that since the 1980s (for path separators and escape characters)
Replies (1)
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@curtmack@floss.social 2026-05-11 14:26
@niconiconi@mk.absturztau.be @amy@mastodon.fibercut.org Now imagine you have a C codebase that was developed in Japan. All of the files use Shift-JIS, which your editor doesn't support, so all of the comments are mojibake. You would like to read the comments, so you use iconv to convert them all into UTF-8. This works, except *none of the code compiles anymore*, because the process turned all of the backslashes into yen signs (U+00A5). Then you give up and never open that project directory again.