"Any other encoding system that keeps a cyrillic alphabet in a separate code range from the latin one would have this problem." Then isn't the solution to put

"Any other encoding system that keeps a cyrillic alphabet in a separate code range from the latin one would have this problem." Then isn't the solution to put the Cyrillic alphabet in the same space as the Latin one when the glyphs are identical? In general, Unicode should merge code points a lot more readily than it does; it shouldn't have some of the strange things it does have, which hog space that would be better used putting semi-common Chinese characters in the Basic Multilingual Pane; and the way it handles hangul is just embarrassing. It's better than nothing (and better than the Codepage-<Insert Number> variety of solutions), but that doesn't mean it's good; that's what I mean by "I Entity Unicode".