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I'm writing an exception error message

2013-10-25 19:11:05.547097+00 by Dan Lyke 7 comments

I'm writing an exception error message. What's the Unicode for a big middle finger glyph?

[ related topics: Writing ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: made: 2013-10-25 19:20:02.484289+00 by: Dan Lyke [edit history]

RT Andrew Craswell @AndrewCraswell

@danlyke If the exception is especially egregious: ..|.. (-_-) ..|..

RT Larry Burton @Larry_D_Burton

@danlyke 凸(-_-)凸

#Comment Re: made: 2013-10-25 21:36:13.602614+00 by: Dan Lyke [edit history]

And it's in Unicode 7: 1F595, "reversed hand with middle finger extended" http://babelstone.blogspot.mx/.../10/whats-new-in-unicode-70.html

That should be '🖕', but I doubt your font has it yet.

#Comment Re: made: 2013-10-25 22:39:36.199816+00 by: Dan Lyke [edit history]

Written for an internal company mailing list:

So Rigo and I were talking about throwing errors for certain programming situations, and I wondered aloud if Unicode had an upraised finger glyph. I pondered this on the Social Medias that the kids these days are using, and substitutes came back in ASCII:

..|.. (-_-) ..|..

And Unicode:

凸(-_-)凸

But neither of those really felt right as an exception to throw for "required parameter missing", until someone pointed out that this is indeed slated for Unicode release 7.0, expected in the summer or autumn of 2014:

1F595, "reversed hand with middle finger extended"

Unfortunately, this means we have to wait a full year until '🖕' is part of the specification, and some time after that before various font families start to pick it up and those reach widespread adoption.

http://babelstone.blogspot.mx/.../10/whats-new-in-unicode-70.html reports that Unicode 7 will also have 1f594 "reversed victory hand" to accompany 270c "victory hand", and for those of you who are often communicating about the original Star Trek, or Rosh Hashanah, 1f596 "raised hand with part between middle and ring fingers".

And I suspect that the latter glyph will be misused by art historians delving into the pseudo-zygodactylous gesture, at least until we can get a glyph that properly captures that nuance.

As was observed about the original Mac interface: Three thousand years developing written language, and we're back to hieroglyphs. Only more so.

#Comment Re: made: 2013-10-25 22:43:30.318568+00 by: meuon

I gotta go update some code... (^_^)

#Comment Re: made: 2013-10-25 23:14:02.022464+00 by: Dan Lyke

And from internal email, a coworker claims dibs on naming the Boyce rule:

the more obscene an error message is, the more likely it will inadvertently be displayed to the end user.

#Comment Re: made: 2013-10-27 19:46:25.74867+00 by: Mars Saxman

I once made a unicode-aware lexer interpret U+2620 'SKULL AND CROSSBONES' as a synonym for the "throw" keyword. I don't think that anyone has ever actually written code which does this, but it makes me feel good to know that it exists.

#Comment Re: made: 2013-10-28 16:29:37.80859+00 by: TC

00100 binary (read between the zeros pal)