5 ms·

It feels like unifying it with the ASCII i is the mistake here. There should have just been 4 turkish characters in 2 pairs, rather than trying to reuse I/i It

• WorldMaker 2y ago
  But even with separate characters, you aren't safe because the ASCII "unification" isn't just Unicode's fault to begin with, in some cases it is historic/cultural in its own ways: German ß has distinct upper and lower case forms, but also has a complicated history of sometimes, depending on locale, the upper case form is "SS" rather than the upper-case form of ß. In many of those same locales the lower-case form of "SS" is "ss", not ß. It doesn't even try to round-trip, and that's sort of intentional/cultural.
  • atoav 2y ago
    Uppercase ẞ exists since 2017, so before that using SS as a replacement was the correct way of doing things. That is relatively recent wh3n it comes tonthat kind of change
• Arnt 2y ago
  When do you think that first mistake happened? (Pick a year, then think about why it didn't happen in that year.)
  • Macha 2y ago
    When Unicode was being specced out originally I guess. There was more interest in unifying characters at that stage (see also the far more controversial Han unification)
    • Arnt 2y ago
      Uh-huh. At that time roundtrip compatiblity with all widely used 8-bit encodings was a major design criterion. Roundtrip meaning that you could take an input string in e.g. iso 8859-9, convert it to unicode, convert it back, and get the same string, still usable for purposes like database lookups. Would you have argued to break database lookups at the time?
      • Macha 2y ago
        ISO-8859-9 actually does have what I suggest: FD/49 are lower/upper dotless ı/I DD/69 are upper/lower dotted İ/i. There's nothing around the capability to round trip that through unicode that required 49 in ISO-8859-9 to be assigned the same unicode codepoint as 49 in ISO-8859-1 because they happen to be visually identical
        • josefx 2y ago
          There is a reason: ISO-8859-9 is an extended ASCII character set. The shared characters are not an accident, they are by definition the same characters. Most ISO character sets follow a specific template with fixed ranges for shared and custom characters. Interpreting that i as anything special would violate the spec.
          • Arnt 2y ago
            In practical terms: Back in those days, people would store a mixture of ASCII and other data in the same database, e.g. ASCII in some rows, ISO-8859-9 in others. (My bank at the time did that, some customers had all-ASCII names, some had names with ø and so on.) If unicode were only mostly compatible with the combination, it wouldn't have been safe to start migrating software that accessed databases/servers/… For example, using UTF8 for display and a database's encoding to access a DBMS would have had difficult-to-understand limitations. You can fix all kinds of bugs if you're able to disregard compatibility with old data or old systems. But you can't. And that's why unicode is constrained by e.g. the combination of a decision made in Sweden hundreds of years ago with one made in Germany around the same time. Compatibility with both leads to nontrivial choices and complexity, incompatibility leads to the scrap heap of software.
• layer8 2y ago
  This stems from the earlier Turkish 8-bit character sets like IBM code page 857, which Unicode was designed to be roundtrip-compatible with. Aside from that, it‘s unlikely that authors writing both Turkish and non-Turkish words would properly switch their input method or language setting between both, so they would get mixed up in practice anyway. There is no escape from knowing (or best-guessing) which language you are performing transformations on, or else just leave the text as-is.