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Comment by throwaway_pdp09 | Hacker News Reader

@toast0, @lazulicurio, both of your points seem to illustrate the complexities of the languages, not "...that Unicode is a flawed idea" as the original poster said. AFAIKS this is intrinsic complexity showing itself and does not make any indication of how it should be done correctly, or better.

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> both of your points seem to illustrate the complexities of the languages, not "...that Unicode is a flawed idea"

The flaw in Unicode is that it punts on the intrinsic complexity---pretending that codepoints have language-independent, plain-text, semantic meaning.

A couple of threads that have molded my views over time:

I can't write my name in Unicode https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9219162 (Specifically these two comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9220530 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9220970)

Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23016832

> The flaw in Unicode is that it punts on the intrinsic complexity---pretending that codepoints have language-independent, plain-text, semantic meaning.

> Pretending "plain text" isn't an oxymoron

FTFY :)

The benefit of looking at languages/scripts in isolation is that the combinatorial explosion of all languages/scripts at once is dodged.

E.g. lookalike charaters, and social engineering by using a vs а. (One is Cyrillic). I don't want to even define "a == а". I want Latin and Cyrillic to be different types of characters, and that expression to be ill-typed.

This solves the Turkish problem, where the upper case I is two different charters in two different types (Turkish Roman script?), and the case folding functions likewise have disjoint types.

> I want Latin and Cyrillic to be different types of characters

How do you concatenate English and Ру́сская text, and what is the type of this sentence?

[Either [Latin] [Cyrillic]] is a very simply type taking advantage that the language only switches at word boundary.

Huh. That doesn't quite address my objection (CamelCase like EnglishEtРу́сская still un-works), but that's actually a good point in the overwhelming majority of cases. I'm not quite convinced this approach works in practice (I'm sticking with "A"="A"="A"), but I'd definitely like to see a more technically fleshed-out design.

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