If I understand correctly, what you're suggesting could be thought of as pre-rendering directionality into the memory layout. If we did that then it might compr

If I understand correctly, what you're suggesting could be thought of as pre-rendering directionality into the memory layout. If we did that then it might compromise our ability to write an algorithm that iterates over a string of hebrew or arabic characters. Display is super complicated and people don't agree on how to do it. For example, consider the arabic text عودة أبو تايه‎. If I sneak a latin A between all those characters to prevent the display algorithm from rearranging and shaping them, then that same string looks like this: عAوAدAةAأAبAوAتAاAيAه. Those are the same characters and you can confirm that yourself using: for c in 'عودة أبو تايه‎': print(unicodedata.name(c)) On the other hand if you want to romanize that string as EWDTA AEBW TAIH then all you need is a for loop and a switch statement, because the memory order is always left to right. We can also rest assured that if someone invents a better display algorithm, we won't need to do any database migrations, since the encoding itself doesn't need to change.