4 ms·
Unicode looks like a big over engineered standard that had 50 hands trying to put their mark in
by m3kw9 3y ago
Unicode looks like a big over engineered standard that had 50 hands trying to put their mark in
- pornel 3y agoThat's because Unicode chose to be a superset of all other encodings, so they've brought everyone else's complexity and tech debt.
- ssokolow 3y agoTechnically, a superset would have to somehow Schrödinger's cat around \ in latin1 and ¥ in Shift-JIS being the same codepoint. Unicode just took it upon themselves to reliably round-trip legacy text... thus the precomposed forms. Most of the other complexity and technical debt is in the writing systems themselves.
- ebiester 3y agoIt looks like that because Unicode is trying to solve a problem that everyone thinks is easy until they uncover the true extent of encoding human languages.
- eviks 3y agoHow does this explain surrogate pairs?
- jfultz 3y agoSurrogate pairs were new to Unicode 2.0. Unicode 1.0 didn't anticipate the need for more than 65,536 code points (who would ever need more?); the main perceived threat to that limit having been resolved by Han unification.
- eviks 3y agoOk, but that doesn't answer the question; it's more of an indication that those design(at)s didn't uncover "the true extent" until years later