Three days ago I was scanning Unicode (looking for useful characters for a roguelike, as one does), came across the metrical triseme (⏗), tetraseme (⏘) and pentraseme (⏙) in the Miscellaneous Symbols section, and added them to wikipedia. As far as I could ascertain, these are used to indicate scansion - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scansion#Other_symbols - which is apparently primarily a term used to describe rhythm and meter in a poetic context. However, the Expletive infixation page uses the alternate term prosody in perhaps more of a formal linguistic sense. PS: prosody & scansion. Certainly on the cryptic crossword one of these decades...
Can I ask what library you use for your roguelikes? Last time I was working with ncurses, I found it doesn't support unicode, and wncurses isn't well support on the Mac.
I use a few libraries. The roguelike one I use is rotLove[0] for LÖVE[1] for Lua[2], which is a port of rot.js[3], which is itself a libtcod[4] port. However, fonts are handled by LÖVE. I have a bug filed with them right now where Chinese text crashes though, so I wouldn't call it ultra stable. Then again, it's just a fun project to learn Lua, so I'm not in a hurry.
Didn't this happen for spellings in various ortography reforms? I think german had the largest one in recent years and iirc there was a deprecation period for old spellings.
An English spelling reform would be a blessing but almost certainly isn't going to happen. And even if something would work it probably would lead to more fun akin to color-colour.
I disagree with this assessment, both on first examination are quite simple. Magnetic memory is as you described, the other stores charge on the plate of a capacitor. We have two effects, one quasi-magnitostatic the other quasi-electrostatic.
Now if we dig down into the details both look seemingly impossible. For hard drives we have read heads that must sweep so close to the spinning platter that they use the wing ground effect to float just over the surface. We no longer can read data with the write coil (not enough gain) so instead we use spin polarization sensors that pass currents of electrons with only one intrinsic spin and then measure the effect the magnetic field of the platter had on the spin of the electrons in the current.
In the case of solid state memory, we are able to pattern silicon wafers with a minimum feature size of 22nm and falling. A single chip is a seemingly miraculous network of chemically deposited thin films and optically patterned cutouts all at a size that beats the detraction limit of light. The mask (imagine an overhead projector's transparency) can not be shaped the same as the intended end-shape pattern of silicon due to very small scale refraction but never fear! We have figured out how to calculate what our mask must look like to beat the diffraction limit. Its all amazing stuff.
I agree that it's amazing and interesting stuff, but both (storage) principles actually seem rather possible when scaled down.
My point really was that one is to this day made of a disk coated in magnetic material (with the read/write head and electronics getting more sophisticated over the years) while the other uses billions upon billions of transistors that are "etched" out of silicon wafers using an ever more complicated process.
Not quite. Take two exponentially growing functions, say e^x and e^2x over the interval [0,infinity). as x-> infinity both grow without bound. So does the difference of e^(2x)-e^x because the former is just so much larger than the second. They both approach infinity, but at different rates! If the difference between two functions (in the limit) converges, that means that the two functions diverge at the same rate (i.e. both with the end behavior of e^(ax) for some constant a) This is all a little hand wavy though but I hope that clears things up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expletive_infixation