4 ms·

@toast0, @lazulicurio, both of your points seem to illustrate the complexities of the languages, not "...that Unicode is a flawed idea" as the original poster s

@toast0, @lazulicurio, both of your points seem to illustrate the complexities of the languages, not "...that Unicode is a flawed idea" as the original poster said. AFAIKS this is intrinsic complexity showing itself and does not make any indication of how it should be done correctly, or better.

lazulicurio 6y ago
> both of your points seem to illustrate the complexities of the languages, not "...that Unicode is a flawed idea" The flaw in Unicode is that it punts on the intrinsic complexity---pretending that codepoints have language-independent, plain-text, semantic meaning. A couple of threads that have molded my views over time: I can't write my name in Unicode https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9219162 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9219162 (Specifically these two comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9220530 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9220530 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9220970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9220970) Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23016832 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23016832
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  > The flaw in Unicode is that it punts on the intrinsic complexity---pretending that codepoints have language-independent, plain-text, semantic meaning. > Pretending "plain text" isn't an oxymoron FTFY :)
Ericson2314 6y ago
The benefit of looking at languages/scripts in isolation is that the combinatorial explosion of all languages/scripts at once is dodged. E.g. lookalike charaters, and social engineering by using a vs а. (One is Cyrillic). I don't want to even define "a == а". I want Latin and Cyrillic to be different types of characters, and that expression to be ill-typed. This solves the Turkish problem, where the upper case I is two different charters in two different types (Turkish Roman script?), and the case folding functions likewise have disjoint types.
- a1369209993 6y ago
  > I want Latin and Cyrillic to be different types of characters How do you concatenate English and Ру́сская text, and what is the type of this sentence?
  - Ericson2314 6y ago
    [Either [Latin] [Cyrillic]] is a very simply type taking advantage that the language only switches at word boundary.
    - a1369209993 6y ago
      Huh. That doesn't quite address my objection (CamelCase like EnglishEtРу́сская still un-works), but that's actually a good point in the overwhelming majority of cases. I'm not quite convinced this approach works in practice (I'm sticking with "A"="A"="A"), but I'd definitely like to see a more technically fleshed-out design.

lazulicurio 6y ago

> both of your points seem to illustrate the complexities of the languages, not "...that Unicode is a flawed idea" The flaw in Unicode is that it punts on the intrinsic complexity---pretending that codepoints have language-independent, plain-text, semantic meaning. A couple of threads that have molded my views over time: I can't write my name in Unicode https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9219162 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9219162 (Specifically these two comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9220530 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9220530 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9220970 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9220970) Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23016832 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23016832

Ericson2314 6y ago
> The flaw in Unicode is that it punts on the intrinsic complexity---pretending that codepoints have language-independent, plain-text, semantic meaning. > Pretending "plain text" isn't an oxymoron FTFY :)

Ericson2314 6y ago

The benefit of looking at languages/scripts in isolation is that the combinatorial explosion of all languages/scripts at once is dodged. E.g. lookalike charaters, and social engineering by using a vs а. (One is Cyrillic). I don't want to even define "a == а". I want Latin and Cyrillic to be different types of characters, and that expression to be ill-typed. This solves the Turkish problem, where the upper case I is two different charters in two different types (Turkish Roman script?), and the case folding functions likewise have disjoint types.

a1369209993 6y ago
> I want Latin and Cyrillic to be different types of characters How do you concatenate English and Ру́сская text, and what is the type of this sentence?
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  [Either [Latin] [Cyrillic]] is a very simply type taking advantage that the language only switches at word boundary.
  - a1369209993 6y ago
    Huh. That doesn't quite address my objection (CamelCase like EnglishEtРу́сская still un-works), but that's actually a good point in the overwhelming majority of cases. I'm not quite convinced this approach works in practice (I'm sticking with "A"="A"="A"), but I'd definitely like to see a more technically fleshed-out design.