4 msΒ·
When I see Unicode-hacks like this (is it a hack? is Unicode supposed to do this?), my instinct reaction is that maybe Unicode is bloated beyond a reasonable mi
by nfoz 11y ago
When I see Unicode-hacks like this (is it a hack? is Unicode supposed to do this?), my instinct reaction is that maybe Unicode is bloated beyond a reasonable mission scope. Maybe it tried to do too much, or maybe it just made some mistakes along the way.
But I don't really know much about it, and I'm suspicious of said instinct. HN what are your thoughts -- what are some controversial ideas around Unicode, and would there have been any simpler alternative that could make sense?
- HappyTypist 11y agoSome languages must naturally be composed of predictable, combinable marks to form glyphs. There are many separated diacritic codepoints, like "\u0061\u0301" = Γ . I don't think this "hack" points to Unicode doing too much. For questionable technical design decisions, look at UTF16, surrogate pairs, etc.
- parenthephobia 11y agoThe ππ¨π₯π, ππ‘ππππ, ππ π¦πππ π€π₯π£π¦ππ, and ππ©ππ π¨π©π’π±π±π’π― gylphs are in Unicode for mathematics, where the style of glyphs is not a merely stylistic choice but is part of their meaning. e.g. β denotes the set of real numbers, whilst R denotes the gas constant. π would by convention be the name of some matrix. ln is the natural logarithm, ππ is the product of π and π. (Only a monster would actually write ln ππ, though.) I don't know why the consortium chose to include these glyphs rather than push it out to markup languages, though.
- gfody 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode#Issues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode#Issues There is always what we had before: ASCII + Codepages, 128 standard fixed chars and 128 "extended" chars dependent on the selected Codepage. We could've just agreed on a control character to use as an escape for switching codepage and called it done. That wouldn't have given us such robust support for diacritics however.