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A comment on Type-safe, K-sortable, globally unique identifier inspired by Stripe IDs. Parent comment

Re:Type-safe, K-sortable, globally unique identifier inspire... by kibwen on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @03:31PM (#36511423)
> The page says the reason for excluding U is "accidental obscenity'.

Crockford is being cheeky. To make a nice base32 alphabet out of non-confusable alphanumeric characters you only need to exclude O, I, and L. This leaves you with 33 characters still, so you need to remove one more, and it doesn't matter which one you remove, so you might as well pick an arbitrary reason for the last character that gets removed (and it's not the worst reason, if your goal is to use these as user-readable IDs, although obviously it's not even remotely bulletproof).

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Re:Type-safe, K-sortable, globally unique identifier inspire... by pluijzer on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @04:44PM (#36512328)
You could argue that U can be confused with V.
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Re:Type-safe, K-sortable, globally unique identifier inspire... by mtlmtlmtlmtl on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @05:26PM (#36512829)
A vaguely related historical tangent is that V and U used to be just two ways of writing the same letter in Early Modern English. Which I imagine is why W is named as "double U" in speaking.
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Re:Type-safe, K-sortable, globally unique identifier inspire... by jabbany on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @06:20PM (#36513444)
This is also interesting since in French (and I think Spanish?) W is (correctly) called "double V"
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Re:Type-safe, K-sortable, globally unique identifier inspire... by namtab00 on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @07:32PM (#36514211)
In Romanian and Italian too.
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Re:Type-safe, K-sortable, globally unique identifier inspire... by mtlmtlmtlmtl on Thursday June 29, 2023 @03:50AM (#36517629)
Same thing in Norwegian. But W is also not really a part of Norwegian orthography, it's just kind of there in the alphabet anyway. Only useful for names and maybe a couple loanwords.
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Re:Type-safe, K-sortable, globally unique identifier inspire... by EGreg on Thursday June 29, 2023 @01:51AM (#36516832)
Same with B and V, P and F, SS and Z, etc.

It is why PH is F, for instance.

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Re:Type-safe, K-sortable, globally unique identifier inspire... by TRiG_Ireland on Thursday June 29, 2023 @05:44AM (#36518343)
That is indeed why w is named "double u" in English (and "double v" in French. And why it's a vowel in Welsh.

See more from jan Misali: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg2j7mZ9-2Y

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Re:Type-safe, K-sortable, globally unique identifier inspire... by dmurray on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @06:09PM (#36513329)
5 and S seems more likely.
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Re:Type-safe, K-sortable, globally unique identifier inspire... by quickthrower2 on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @06:45PM (#36513715)
Fvck!
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Re:Type-safe, K-sortable, globally unique identifier inspire... by quickthrower2 on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @06:48PM (#36513742)
U is a fairly new letter anyway.
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Re:Type-safe, K-sortable, globally unique identifier inspire... by dolmen on Thursday June 29, 2023 @05:00AM (#36518056)
This assumes that english is the only relevant language regarding curse words. Which is quite biased.
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