Oh, no! The Lowest-level* Programming Language is Unicode-aware and I have no excuses?! by JeanHeyd Meneide Goodness gracious! It seems like there’s a lot of consternation that the lowest level programming languages and several newer ones do a very poor job of handling Unicode and giving people the means to handle it. And every day, people continue to say things like “only use alphanumeric ASCII letters and numbers for this form” day in and day out. Our names get truncated and filtered. We change ourselves and, for more important matters made digital (banking, flight tickets, and more), we have to reconcile what the computer allows and what people who control our lives see on our official documentation. Is today the day we need to be taken off to the side for a “random, routine inspection”? Even if people are ratchet in the real world, these systems are digital. They are supposed to be able to do anything we want to, and yet we ended up here. Let’s talk about how we got here, and more importantly, let’s talk about what we’re doing right now to fix this godawful mess. * Okay assembly, machine code, stream processing, etc. are all ““lower”” than C but practically speaking, you get what I mean! JeanHeyd “ThePhD” is a student. They are the Project Editor for the C Language, and they manage their greatest open-source contribution – sol2 – that is used across many industries and academic disciplines. They are currently working towards earning their own nickname, climbing the academic ladder while spending as much time as possible contributing to C++ standardization and development. Their newest and biggest project is Unicode for C++. Learn more about JeanHeyd’s work at their website. They very much love dogs and hopes to have their own in a year or so. They also like TWRP’s “Feels Pretty Good” from the album Together Through Time.