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> There’s no excuse. I politely disagree. None of the programming languages which started integrating Unicode was targeting from bare metal to GUI, incl. embed

> There’s no excuse. I politely disagree. None of the programming languages which started integrating Unicode was targeting from bare metal to GUI, incl. embedded and OS development at the same time. C++ has a great target area when compared to other programming languages. There are widely used libraries which compile correctly on PDP-11s, even if they are updated constantly. You can't just say "I'll be just making everything Unicode aware, backwards compatibility be damned, eh".

blenderob 2y ago
But we don't have to make everything Unicode aware. Backward compatibility is indeed very important in C++. Like you rightly said, it still has to work for PDP-11 without breaking anything. But the C++ overlords could always add a new type that is Unicode-aware. Converting one Unicode string to another is a purely in-memory, in-CPU operation. It does not need any I/O and it does not need any interaction with peripherals. So one can dream that such a type along with its conversion routines could be added to an updated standard library without breaking existing code that compiles correctly on PDP-11s.
- bayindirh 2y ago
  > Converting one Unicode string to another is a purely in-memory, in-CPU operation. ...but it's a complex operation. This is what libICU is mostly for. You can't just look-up a single table and convert a string to another like you work on ASCII table or any other simple encoding. Germans have their ß to S (or capital ß depending on the year), Turkish has ı/I and i/İ pairs, and tons of other languages have other rules. Esp, this I/ı and İ/i pairs break tons of applications in very unexpected ways. I don't remember how many bugs I reported, and how many workarounds I have implemented in my systems. Adding a type is nice, but the surrounding machinery is so big, it brings tons of work with itself. Unicode is such a complicated system, that I read that even you need two UTF-16 characters (4 bytes in total) to encode a single character. This is insane (as in complexity, I guess they have their reasons).
  - account42 2y ago
    > Germans have their ß to S (or capital ß depending on the year) FYI, it's never S. If there is no better option then SS and ss are the proper capital and lowercase substitutions.
  - blenderob 2y ago
    Thanks for the reply! Really appreciate the time you have taken to write down a thoughtful reply.
    - bayindirh 2y ago
      No problems! If you want a slightly longer write-up, here's a classic I constantly share with people: https://blog.codinghorror.com/whats-wrong-with-turkey/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/whats-wrong-with-turkey/
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - SAI_Peregrinus 2y ago
    > Unicode is such a complicated system, that I read that even you need two UTF-16 characters (4 bytes in total) to encode a single character. This is insane (as in complexity, I guess they have their reasons). Because there are more than 65,535 characters. That's just writing systems, not Unicode's fault. Most of the unnecessary complexity of Unicode is legacy compatibility: UTF-16 & UTF-32 are bad ideas that increase complexity, but they predate UTF-8 which actually works decently well so they get kept around for backwards compatibility. Likewise with the need for multiple normalization forms.
    - bayindirh 2y ago
      I mean, I already know some Unicode internals and linguistics (since I developed a language-specific compression algorithm back in the day), but I have never seen a single character requiring four bytes (and I know Emoji chaining for skin color, etc.). So, seeing this just moved the complexity of Unicode one notch up in my head, and I respect the guys who designed and made it work. It was not whining or complaining of any sort. :)

blenderob 2y ago

But we don't have to make everything Unicode aware. Backward compatibility is indeed very important in C++. Like you rightly said, it still has to work for PDP-11 without breaking anything. But the C++ overlords could always add a new type that is Unicode-aware. Converting one Unicode string to another is a purely in-memory, in-CPU operation. It does not need any I/O and it does not need any interaction with peripherals. So one can dream that such a type along with its conversion routines could be added to an updated standard library without breaking existing code that compiles correctly on PDP-11s.

bayindirh 2y ago
> Converting one Unicode string to another is a purely in-memory, in-CPU operation. ...but it's a complex operation. This is what libICU is mostly for. You can't just look-up a single table and convert a string to another like you work on ASCII table or any other simple encoding. Germans have their ß to S (or capital ß depending on the year), Turkish has ı/I and i/İ pairs, and tons of other languages have other rules. Esp, this I/ı and İ/i pairs break tons of applications in very unexpected ways. I don't remember how many bugs I reported, and how many workarounds I have implemented in my systems. Adding a type is nice, but the surrounding machinery is so big, it brings tons of work with itself. Unicode is such a complicated system, that I read that even you need two UTF-16 characters (4 bytes in total) to encode a single character. This is insane (as in complexity, I guess they have their reasons).
- account42 2y ago
  > Germans have their ß to S (or capital ß depending on the year) FYI, it's never S. If there is no better option then SS and ss are the proper capital and lowercase substitutions.
- blenderob 2y ago
  Thanks for the reply! Really appreciate the time you have taken to write down a thoughtful reply.
  - bayindirh 2y ago
    No problems! If you want a slightly longer write-up, here's a classic I constantly share with people: https://blog.codinghorror.com/whats-wrong-with-turkey/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/whats-wrong-with-turkey/
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- SAI_Peregrinus 2y ago
  > Unicode is such a complicated system, that I read that even you need two UTF-16 characters (4 bytes in total) to encode a single character. This is insane (as in complexity, I guess they have their reasons). Because there are more than 65,535 characters. That's just writing systems, not Unicode's fault. Most of the unnecessary complexity of Unicode is legacy compatibility: UTF-16 & UTF-32 are bad ideas that increase complexity, but they predate UTF-8 which actually works decently well so they get kept around for backwards compatibility. Likewise with the need for multiple normalization forms.
  - bayindirh 2y ago
    I mean, I already know some Unicode internals and linguistics (since I developed a language-specific compression algorithm back in the day), but I have never seen a single character requiring four bytes (and I know Emoji chaining for skin color, etc.). So, seeing this just moved the complexity of Unicode one notch up in my head, and I respect the guys who designed and made it work. It was not whining or complaining of any sort. :)