Why the \cdot? Is Unicode required to parse assembly? | Hacker News

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tel on Feb 7, 2013 | parent | context | favorite | on: Go and Assembly

Why the \cdot? Is Unicode required to parse assembly?

vanderZwan on Feb 8, 2013 [–]

"Source code is Unicode text encoded in UTF-8."

http://golang.org/ref/spec#Source_code_representation

Historical reason, TL;DR edition: Plan 9 based compilers, because Ken Thompson.

EDIT: see also mseepgood's response: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5185334

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