> For comparing the symbols visually, you don't even need to know their names. Well, no, this was the main issue with homograph attacks in domain names [1] tha

> For comparing the symbols visually, you don't even need to know their names. Well, no, this was the main issue with homograph attacks in domain names [1] that brought us to the use of punycode in browsers [2] In particular for a cryptographic library, I wouldn't want to constantly have to watch out for sneaky malicious variables put in the right place (e.g. try to compare visually the Cyrillic а, с, е, о, р, х, у with the ascii a, c, e, o, p, x, y (no, they're not the same characters). EDIT: I realize that many programming languages today allow the use of unicode variables and I like that it's a possibility, it's just not the best when you need to be paranoid about the code - [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack - [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode