3 ms·

> English is the language of the world Math is the language of the universe. How am I supposed to represent/parse/write mathematical symbols like ∊ or ℚ or π

• collegeburner 5y ago
  Hmm fair point. I think maybe stuff like LaTeX is better for domain-specific though. Still we could have a much simpler unicode with a max 2-byte character and characters with consistent width, no joining/merging/shaping, eliminate the need for harfbuzz if we just refuse to support non-English human languages on computers.
  • colejohnson66 5y ago
    That’s what we had before Unicode, and it was hell. Every country had their own opinions on what to put in the blank spaces in the codepoint map. As for a max 2-byte encoding, UCS-2 tried that. Turns out 65k points isn’t enough (even ignoring emoji), and now we have the hack known as UTF-16. Unicode currently encompasses over 144 thousand codepoints. How many are emoji? Only ~3.5k. So even if we removed emoji, 16 bits still wouldn’t be nearly enough. Instead of saying we should go back to the past, one should first see why we don’t do the things we did in that past