[QUOTE=Dubslow;299991]I honestly couldn't understand his post.

I went on a spree, and now the Chinese character renders. Any clue where I can get dead languages?[/QUOTE]I'll look into it and get back to you. In the meantime, you might try to find this character: 𒊩 which is transliterated as SAL. In Unicode, it is U+122A9

Paul

[QUOTE=xilman;299993]I'll look into it and get back to you. In the meantime, you might try to find this character: 𒊩 which is transliterated as SAL. In Unicode, it is U+122A9

Paul[/QUOTE]A few minutes Googling around turned up this resource:
[url]http://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/[/url] and links thereunder.


You should be able to do at least as well as I did. Doing so is left as an exercise.

[QUOTE=Dubslow;299991]I honestly couldn't understand his post.

I went on a spree, and now the Chinese character renders. Any clue where I can get dead languages?

Edit: Found this: [url]http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/fonts.html[/url] and this: [url]http://www.wazu.jp/[/url]
What should I grab for the Sumerian? The hieroglyph looks funny.[/QUOTE]Ah, this edit appeared after I read your post.

I've already given you a pointer for the cuneiform (with additional wordplay for you to work out).

[QUOTE=R.D. Silverman;299989]Language holy wars serve no useful purpose. Combatants never reach a
resolution. As a former colleague once said "It is possible to write Fortran
in any language".[/QUOTE]And as I've said, it is possible to write any language in Fortran.

I'm not the originator of that latter statement. Remember that Crowther and Woods wrote ADVENT in FORTRAN-IV because they had been told it was "impossible" in that language. To which the response was XYZZY.

[QUOTE=xilman;299995]Ah, this edit appeared after I read your post.

I've already given you a pointer for the cuneiform (with additional wordplay for you to work out).[/QUOTE]

I had also found this: [url]http://unifont.org/fontguide/[/url]
It has a nice sh script, when I say script I mean just a list of wgets. What I didn't realize initially is that wget doesn't handle errors well; if it gets a 404, it terminates; and since it's an old script, 1/3-1/2 of the targets give 404s, so I thought it was just a few fonts until by chance about 15 mins ago I actually looked at the script and noticed there were a lot more. I have since been going through and commenting out the bad lines, which I only finished a minute ago. We'll how far this gets me. Edit: Despite the relatively large proportion of bad wgets, I still got ~180 fonts from it. None of them were cuneiform, though I'd expect it to be mostly scripts-in-use anyways.

Edit2: [url]http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/[/url]
"Aegean and Mediterranean Scripts, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Sumero-Akkadian Cuneiform, Musical Symbols, Maya Hieroglyphs, Symbol Blocks of the Unicode Standard, Fonts based on Early Editions of Greek Texts, et al."
Edit3: That did it. It looks like a circuit diagram :razz:

(Still lost on the wordplay, even the first one.)
Woman? The first isn't in [URL="http://glosbe.com/akk/en/%F0%92%84%90"]this dictionary[/URL], and I'm not sure how only human got which word it is out of his link, seeing as there's only latin text (and no Unicode numbers).

[QUOTE=xilman;299997]And as I've said, it is possible to write any language in Fortran.

I'm not the originator of that latter statement. Remember that Crowther and Woods wrote ADVENT in FORTRAN-IV because they had been told it was "impossible" in that language. To which the response was XYZZY.[/QUOTE]

Yep. They wrote it on a Decsystem-10 which had a 36-bit wordsize and
stored 5 ASCII characters per word. I was actually at DEC right after they
released the code. Porting it to a PDP-11 was fun........

[QUOTE=R.D. Silverman;300011]Yep. They wrote it on a Decsystem-10 which had a 36-bit wordsize and
stored 5 ASCII characters per word. I was actually at DEC right after they
released the code. Porting it to a PDP-11 was fun........
[/QUOTE]

Actually I remember the PDP-11 quite well. That's where I learned my one and only assembly language and is completely useless now.

[QUOTE=R.D. Silverman;300011]
Language holy wars serve no useful purpose. Combatants never reach a
[I] resolution. As a former colleague once said "It is possible to write Fortran
in any language".[/I]
[/QUOTE]

You can also write Conway's Game of Life inside Conway's Game of Life.

[QUOTE=jyb;299992]
Ah yes, this is a very good example. It captures the essence of the distinction between the use of 0 (or NULL) and the actual representation.

[.... a whole bunch stuff which I totally agree with]

Sounds good to me.
[/QUOTE]

I don't think this whole discussion helped Dubslow very much, so it will be a relief to move on.

[QUOTE=Dubslow;299998](Still lost on the wordplay, even the first one.)
Woman?[/QUOTE]PM sent.

No explanation for the rest of you until you've had a chance to work it out. The reasoning clearly isn't too obscure because only_human got it essentially straight away.

Paul

[QUOTE=xilman;300018]PM sent.

No explanation for the rest of you until you've had a chance to work it out. The reasoning clearly isn't too obscure because only_human got it essentially straight away.

Paul[/QUOTE]

Cunning linguist, indeed.

My two cents are attached (and fortunately I don't ever envision them being removed).

A somewhat better rendering of the middle glyph (as if any of us really need it).

[i][The moderator] ...is available from Dubslow via PM upon request.[/i]