3 ms·
The real wtf here is a separate K for Kelvin, a separate N for Newton, etc. Why on gods' greenish earth do we need something that looks like a duck, quacks like
by arpa 6y ago
The real wtf here is a separate K for Kelvin, a separate N for Newton, etc. Why on gods' greenish earth do we need something that looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, but actually is not a duck but an eldritch horror?
- azornathogron 6y agoOne of the design criteria for Unicode was to guarantee lossless round-trip conversion through Unicode for a bunch of encodings that Unicode superceded. If one of those encodings contained both a K and a K-for-Kelvin, then Unicode also had to allocate two codepoints for it. I don't know if that's the case for these characters in particular, but it is one possible explanation. Supporting round-trip conversion may sound pointless now that Unicode is ubiquitous, but it was probably necessary to make gradual adoption practical. Ref: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_compatibility_characters https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_compatibility_charac...
- arpa 6y agoThat could explain it, but it doesn't make it any less crazy. I'm tempted to use K-for-Kelvin in my code now, just to fuck with anyone who works with a worse IDE or tries finding things with grep.