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Should have just gone with 32 bit characters and no combinations. Utter simplicity.
by Ekaros 1y ago
Should have just gone with 32 bit characters and no combinations. Utter simplicity.
- amake 1y agoWhat does "no combinations" mean?
- Ekaros 1y agoLike say Ä it might be either Ä a single byte, or combination of ¨ and A. Both are now supported, but if you can have more than two such things going in one thing it makes a mess.
- amake 1y agoThat's fundamental to the mission of Unicode because Unicode is meant to be compatible with all legacy character sets, and those character sets already included combining characters. So "no combinations" was never going to happen.
- int_19h 1y agoThat quickly explodes if you need more than one diacritic per letter (e.g. Vietnamese often has two, and then there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet#Diacritics_and_prosodic_notation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...).
- bawolff 1y agoI think combining characters are a lot simpler than having every single combination ever. Especially when you start getting into non latin-based languages.
- guappa 1y agoThat would be extremely wasteful, every single text file would be 4x larger and I'm sure eventually it would not be enough anyway.
- Ekaros 1y agoMaybe we should have just replaced ascii, horrible encoding were entire 25% of it is wasted. And maybe we could have gotten a bit more efficiency by saying instead of having both lower and uppercase letters just have one and then have a modifier before it. Saving lot of space as most text could just be lowercase.
- guappa 1y agoyeah that's how ascii works… there's 1 bit for lower/upper case.