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submitted 1 year ago by realitista@lemmy.world to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev

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[-] itsraining@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Technically I don't think any Greek layout uses a different Unicode codepoint for the question mark. In fact, the ordinary semicolon symbol is used, so what the meme describes would probably not happen IRL.

Does all this make it any less funnier? No. It's still brilliant.

[-] luciferofastora@lemmy.zip 12 points 1 year ago

In Unicode, it is separately encoded as U+037E ; GREEK QUESTION MARK, but the similarity is so great that the code point is normalised to U+003B ; SEMICOLON, making the marks identical in practice.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question_mark

I'm still curious whether it would be accepted by the code interpreters / compilers of various languages. I'm not bold enough to assume they all normalise properly.

[-] itsraining@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

Wow, thank you, didn't know of that.

[-] nxfsi@lemmy.world 7 points 1 year ago

Unicode should have enforced the principle of using the same encoding for similar looking characters like they did with CJK instead of allowing bullshit like the Cyrillic "o" or the Greek question mark.