3 ms·

There is no reason to believe the current rate (about ~35,000 over the period 2010--2020) to change rapidly, so we are probably safe for this century. You shoul

There is no reason to believe the current rate (about ~35,000 over the period 2010--2020) to change rapidly, so we are probably safe for this century. You should be aware that emoji gender and skin color is encoded in character sequences and modifiers rather than atomic characters, exactly in order to avoid that exponential growth. And in the unlikely case that Unicode gets so many characters somehow, you can always extend it: http://ucsx.org/ http://ucsx.org/

jancsika 5y ago
Ok but what about all the cryptocurrency symbols? Those will probably accelerate the rate. Perhaps not by a significant or even measurable amount. Nonetheless, it's a great reason to start investigating a blockchain alternative to Unicode
- lifthrasiir 5y ago
  The successful bitcoin sign proposal [1] explicitly deals with such a criticism: > Will Unicode be flooded with symbols for many crypto-currencies? > Most other crypto-currencies have learned from the difficulty that a non-Unicode symbol causes for Bitcoin, and use a symbol already in Unicode. For instance, Dogecoin uses Đ, Ethereum uses Ξ, Litecoin uses Ł, Namecoin uses ℕ, Peercoin uses Ᵽ and Primecoin uses Ψ. Some, like Ripple, use Roman capital letters (XRP), mimicking ISO 4217 currency codes. > While it is possible another crypto-currency will have a non-Unicode symbol that is extensively used in text, this is unlikely. I think this section was crucial for the eventual acceptance, because Unicode people do care (a lot) about long-term consequences of proposals. [1] https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2015/15229-bitcoin-sign.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2015/15229-bitcoin-sign.pdf
  - nybble41 5y ago
    It seem to me that this is something best handled with tag characters, like ¤XBT + (U+E007F) = ₿ (where the letters are from the tag block, U+E00xx). This mirrors one of the two systems for rendering national flags[0], just with a different starting codepoint, and can easily accommodate all the ISO 4217 currency codes and common unofficial extensions. If a system doesn't know how to render a particular glyph it can just fall back to showing the Roman capital letters. The downside of this approach is size: each tag codepoint (including the end marker) requires four bytes in UTF-8, plus two for ¤, so the sequence above is 18 bytes long. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tags_(Unicode_block)#Current_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tags_(Unicode_block)#Current_u...
    - lifthrasiir 5y ago
      That sounds interesting, but modern currency symbols are already fast-tracked anyway---they almost always get assigned in the next version of Unicode---and more than one currency symbols for given ISO 4217 code can exist so I don't think it would work.
      - nybble41 5y ago
        > modern currency symbols are already fast-tracked anyway For national currencies, perhaps. New national currencies aren't introduced all that often, and there is a lot of pressure to support them quickly as their use is often mandatory for anyone living in that jurisdiction. For new private currencies, including crypto-currencies, we don't see quite the same eagerness—the observation that new crypto-currencies were more likely to reuse existing Unicode symbols than invent new ones was a consideration in getting the Bitcoin symbol adopted, as they didn't want to open up the floodgates to large numbers of new currency symbols. The tag-based system offers a compromise. > and more than one currency symbols for given ISO 4217 code can exist so I don't think it would work That is a bit of a problem, but it could be handled with the variant selector codepoints, for example ¤MOP = MOP$, ¤MOP(VS1) = 圓, and ¤MOP(VS2) = 元, if the symbols have the same meaning. To save some space the VS could replace the end codepoint. For fractional units there could be a different prefix such as ¢ for 1/100 or ₥ for 1/1000 in place of the ¤, or incorporating one of the Unicode fraction codepoints for other ratios up to ⅞ (or ⅑ or ⅒). These would be rendered verbatim in the fallback version, like ¢USD.
Jarmsie 5y ago
secret-noun 5y ago
> emoji gender and skin color is encoded in character sequences A good tool to see this broken down is https://unicode-x-ray.vercel.app/?t=%E2%9C%8C%F0%9F%8F%BC%F0%9F%91%A9%F0%9F%8F%BE%E2%80%8D%E2%9D%A4%EF%B8%8F%E2%80%8D%F0%9F%91%A8%F0%9F%8F%BC%F0%9F%A4%B8%F0%9F%8F%BF%E2%80%8D%E2%99%82%EF%B8%8F%F0%9F%87%AC%F0%9F%87%B7 https://unicode-x-ray.vercel.app/?t=%E2%9C%8C%F0%9F%8F%BC%F0... (edit: fixed url to use percent encoded emoji)

jancsika 5y ago

Ok but what about all the cryptocurrency symbols? Those will probably accelerate the rate. Perhaps not by a significant or even measurable amount. Nonetheless, it's a great reason to start investigating a blockchain alternative to Unicode

lifthrasiir 5y ago
The successful bitcoin sign proposal [1] explicitly deals with such a criticism: > Will Unicode be flooded with symbols for many crypto-currencies? > Most other crypto-currencies have learned from the difficulty that a non-Unicode symbol causes for Bitcoin, and use a symbol already in Unicode. For instance, Dogecoin uses Đ, Ethereum uses Ξ, Litecoin uses Ł, Namecoin uses ℕ, Peercoin uses Ᵽ and Primecoin uses Ψ. Some, like Ripple, use Roman capital letters (XRP), mimicking ISO 4217 currency codes. > While it is possible another crypto-currency will have a non-Unicode symbol that is extensively used in text, this is unlikely. I think this section was crucial for the eventual acceptance, because Unicode people do care (a lot) about long-term consequences of proposals. [1] https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2015/15229-bitcoin-sign.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2015/15229-bitcoin-sign.pdf
- nybble41 5y ago
  It seem to me that this is something best handled with tag characters, like ¤XBT + (U+E007F) = ₿ (where the letters are from the tag block, U+E00xx). This mirrors one of the two systems for rendering national flags[0], just with a different starting codepoint, and can easily accommodate all the ISO 4217 currency codes and common unofficial extensions. If a system doesn't know how to render a particular glyph it can just fall back to showing the Roman capital letters. The downside of this approach is size: each tag codepoint (including the end marker) requires four bytes in UTF-8, plus two for ¤, so the sequence above is 18 bytes long. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tags_(Unicode_block)#Current_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tags_(Unicode_block)#Current_u...
  - lifthrasiir 5y ago
    That sounds interesting, but modern currency symbols are already fast-tracked anyway---they almost always get assigned in the next version of Unicode---and more than one currency symbols for given ISO 4217 code can exist so I don't think it would work.
    - nybble41 5y ago
      > modern currency symbols are already fast-tracked anyway For national currencies, perhaps. New national currencies aren't introduced all that often, and there is a lot of pressure to support them quickly as their use is often mandatory for anyone living in that jurisdiction. For new private currencies, including crypto-currencies, we don't see quite the same eagerness—the observation that new crypto-currencies were more likely to reuse existing Unicode symbols than invent new ones was a consideration in getting the Bitcoin symbol adopted, as they didn't want to open up the floodgates to large numbers of new currency symbols. The tag-based system offers a compromise. > and more than one currency symbols for given ISO 4217 code can exist so I don't think it would work That is a bit of a problem, but it could be handled with the variant selector codepoints, for example ¤MOP = MOP$, ¤MOP(VS1) = 圓, and ¤MOP(VS2) = 元, if the symbols have the same meaning. To save some space the VS could replace the end codepoint. For fractional units there could be a different prefix such as ¢ for 1/100 or ₥ for 1/1000 in place of the ¤, or incorporating one of the Unicode fraction codepoints for other ratios up to ⅞ (or ⅑ or ⅒). These would be rendered verbatim in the fallback version, like ¢USD.

Jarmsie 5y ago

secret-noun 5y ago

> emoji gender and skin color is encoded in character sequences A good tool to see this broken down is https://unicode-x-ray.vercel.app/?t=%E2%9C%8C%F0%9F%8F%BC%F0%9F%91%A9%F0%9F%8F%BE%E2%80%8D%E2%9D%A4%EF%B8%8F%E2%80%8D%F0%9F%91%A8%F0%9F%8F%BC%F0%9F%A4%B8%F0%9F%8F%BF%E2%80%8D%E2%99%82%EF%B8%8F%F0%9F%87%AC%F0%9F%87%B7 https://unicode-x-ray.vercel.app/?t=%E2%9C%8C%F0%9F%8F%BC%F0... (edit: fixed url to use percent encoded emoji)