2 ms·

Alright, makes sense. Regarding the "why", well, Unicode has a lot of weirdness already. Like the subscript/superscript characters that don't cover any complete

• tialaramex 5y ago
  Unicode's goals include subsuming all prior existing text encodings. That means ASCII and ISO-8859-1 of course, but also really obscure encodings that maybe only were ever used on a handful of machines. The idea is if your project isn't using Unicode, the reason shouldn't ever be "Oh we need this obscure character - we use it for compatibility with our 1978 Huge Corp X42 mainframe but it isn't in Unicode". This is often the reason why character X is in Unicode but seemingly equally useful character Y isn't. At some point somebody put X in an encoding on some archaic hardware you've never seen, but not Y. In this sort of case neither X nor Y are things you should emit if you don't need them, but they're in Unicode in case somebody finds a pile of Huge Corp X42 tapes and wants to convert that to Unicode. In cases where both X and Y, and even the more obscure Z are encoded, chances are Unicode has them all because humans (not just some obscure computer hardware from the dark ages) used X, Y and Z to write stuff, and another Unicode goal is to be able to encode all human writing systems. The over-abundance of combining forms you abused on your word "this" is almost all for that reason.