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Another dum dum Unicode idea is having multiple code points with identical glyphs. Rule of thumb: two Unicode sequences that look identical when printed should
by WalterBright 8mo ago
Another dum dum Unicode idea is having multiple code points with identical glyphs.
Rule of thumb: two Unicode sequences that look identical when printed should consist of the same code points.
- jeltz 8mo agoI don't think that would help much. There are also characters which are similar but not the same and I don't think humans can spot the differences unless they are actively looking for them which most of the time people are not. If only one of two glyphs which are similar appear in the text nobody would likely notice, expectation bias will fuck you over.
- WalterBright 8mo agoI wonder how anybody got by with printed books.
- nswango 8mo agoSo you think that the letters in the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets which are printed identically to the Latin A should not exist? And, for example, Greek words containing this letter should be encoded with a mix of Latin and Greek characters?
- WalterBright 8mo ago> So you think that the letters in the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets which are printed identically to the Latin A should not exist? Yes. Unicode should not be about semantic meaning, it should be about the visual. Like text in a book. > And, for example, Greek words containing this letter should be encoded with a mix of Latin and Greek characters? Yup. Consider a printed book. How can you tell if a letter is a Greek letter or a Latin letter? Those Unicode homonyms are a solution looking for a problem.
- Muromec 8mo ago>Yup. Consider a printed book. How can you tell if a letter is a Greek letter or a Latin letter? I can absolutely tell Cyrillic k from the lating к and latin u from the Cyrillic и. >should not be about semantic meaning, It's always better to be able to preserve more information in a text and not less.
- WalterBright 8mo ago> I can absolutely tell Cyrillic k from the lating к and latin u from the Cyrillic и. They look visually distinct to me. I don't get your point. > It's always better to be able to preserve more information in a text and not less. Text should not lose information by printing it and then OCR'ing it.
- Yokohiii 8mo agoUnicode is about semantics not appearance. If you don't need semantics then use something different.
- WalterBright 8mo ago> Unicode is about semantics not appearance. And that's where it went off the rails into lala land. 'a' can have all kinds of distinct meanings. How are you going to make that work? It's hopeless.
- Yokohiii 8mo agoIt already works. Tell me what the problem is and what your proposed solution would be.
- WalterBright 8mo agoInfer the meaning from the context. a) it's a bullet point b) a+b means a is a variable c) apple means a means the sound "aaaah" d) ape means a means the sound "aye" e) 0xa means a means "10" f) "a" on my test paper means I did well on it g) grade "a" means I bought the good bolts h) "achtung" means it's a German "a" I didn't need 8 different Unicode characters. And so on.
- Yokohiii 8mo agoWhat about numbers? Would they be assigned to arabic only? I guess someone will be offended by that. While at it we could also unify I, | and l. It's too confusing sometimes.
- WalterBright 8mo ago> While at it we could also unify I, | and l. It's too confusing sometimes. They render differently, so it's not a problem.
- Yokohiii 8mo agototally not true :D
- WalterBright 8mo agoLook again at its rendering!
- ted_dunning 8mo agoThey only render differently in some fonts, on some displays.
- wcoenen 8mo agoAs far as I know, glyphs are determined by the font and rendering engine. They're not in the Unicode standard.
- WalterBright 8mo agoFraktur (font) and italic (rendering) are in the Unicode standard, although Hackernews will not render them. (I suspect that the Hackernews software filters out the nuttier Unicode stuff.)
- estebank 8mo agoIf anything, Unicode should have had more disambiguated characters. Han unification was a mistake, and lower case dotted Turkish i and upper case dotless Turkish I should exist so that toUpper and toLower didn't need to know/guess at a locale to work correctly.
- WalterBright 8mo agoCharacters should not have invisible semantics.
- ted_dunning 8mo agoOne of the ground rules of Unicode is the round trip rule. You have to be able to translate to and from Unicode without loss of information.
- WalterBright 8mo agoThey threw that out the window with normalization.