I don't think it's that simple. ASCII and ISO 8859 didn't have luxurious code spaces, so they had less semantics than Unicode. Unicode, as it's name implies,

I don't think it's that simple. ASCII and ISO 8859 didn't have luxurious code spaces, so they had less semantics than Unicode. Unicode, as it's name implies, tries to unify these (and other) codesets. When unifying codesets you sometimes have to decide whether to unify two distinct codepoints for similar glyphs or not, and if not, then semantics intrude via the two codepoints' names (and, therefore, purpose). You might recall that Unicode 2.x tried to unify CJK... -- that was back when Unicode did not have a sufficiently-luxurious code space, and that unification, politically, went badly. In many ways it might have been better to have exactly one codepoint per distinct glyph, but in practice, the ability to have simple algorithms to map from existing codesets to Unicode, politics, and the ability to distinguish script (in the cases of otherwise-equal codepoints) turned out to be more important.