4 ms·

This isn't about Unicode having "loosey-goosey" anything. It's about aa mapping that Microsoft came up with to map Unicode to non-Unicode.

• SAI_Peregrinus 2y ago
  Yeah, they could have mapped code points to their textual descriptions. That'd require reallocations, but converting ＂to UNICODE_FULLWIDTH_QUOTATION_MARK_U+FF02 would be unambiguous. Ugly, but obvious what happened. Better than � IMO!
  • cryptonector 2y ago
    Since there's two possible antecedents for "they" (the Unicode Consortium, and Microsoft) here you'll have to clarify. Also, my question really was for u/UltraSane. Microsoft should just never have created Best-Fit -- it's a disaster. If you have to lose information, use an ASCII character to denote loss of information and be done. (I hesitate to offer `?` as that character.) Or fail to spawn the process with an error indicating the impossibility of transcoding. Failure is better actually.
    • SAI_Peregrinus 2y ago
      Oh, failure is way better. But a lot of the original APIs didn't have failures, they just returned a value, and MS doesn't like to break backwards compatibility even when it'd be easier for everyone if they did. For "they", I mean MS could have made BestFit work as follows: if an input string contains characters not in the user's code page, then return a new string with characters replaced by with the name of that code point as assigned by the Unicode consortium (and maybe also the textual code point number U+<number>). This requires a new allocation and copies of the parts of the string not needing replacement, but loses no information and creates no security holes.
      • cryptonector 2y ago
        CreateProcess() and related APIs can fail.
        • account42 2y ago
          CreateProcess() doesn't know what functions the resulting process will use to access the command-line and environment.