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A comment on The surprisingly subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed how we use language. Parent comment

Re:The surprisingly subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed h... by cratermoon on Sunday November 05, 2023 @12:15PM (#38153154)
Strings are a primitive type. Names are not strings in the same way Dates are not strings. They can be implemented, represented, and printed as strings, but they have behaviors and meaning that the primitive string type does not.

To use another example, a binary tree is not an array, although it can be implemented using an array.

Money is not a floating point value, and woe to the programmer that tries to use float for money.

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Re:The surprisingly subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed h... by mcpackieh on Sunday November 05, 2023 @01:50PM (#38154271)
There are international standards for representing dates, but none exist for names. Names do not abide by any scheme or set of rules, therefore the only appropriate data structure for storing names is a unicode string. Anything else will exclude people.
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Re:The surprisingly subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed h... by cratermoon on Sunday November 05, 2023 @04:37PM (#38155905)
Point me to the international standards for representing money.
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Re:The surprisingly subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed h... by Shadowmist on Monday November 06, 2023 @01:14AM (#38159442)
ISO 4217
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Re:The surprisingly subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed h... by cratermoon on Monday November 06, 2023 @01:06PM (#38166212)
TIL
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Re:The surprisingly subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed h... by esafak on Sunday November 05, 2023 @07:31PM (#38157335)
Without making assumptions about the origin of the name, you can't impute any structure onto that string, can you? In that case, it is still simply a string.
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Re:The surprisingly subtle ways Microsoft Word has changed h... by cratermoon on Thursday November 09, 2023 @05:08PM (#38212064)
> making assumptions

We have i18n to give context, no assumptions needed.

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