Hacker News Reader

Are you aware of the maximum number of Unicode codepoints which can exist, offhand?

And how that compares to the number of 7-bit ASCII characters?

And how many special cases would have to be considered?

Scale matters.

The risks:reward ratio from 7-bit ASCII is low and manageable. The expressive capability is high. No, it's not a perfect representation for all languages. It is, however, a sufficient one, where common understanding is necessary.

View on HN

The low number of ASCII symbols forces developers to reuse them for all purposes. The number of security holes with ASCII characters is order(s?) of magnitude larger than with Unicode. The problem of apple vs appIe (all Latin) vs аррІе(all Cyrillic) vs elppa (all Latin in reverse) is well known.

In practice, re-use is a relatively limited problem.

At 128 vs. 10^20 possible codepoints, many in Unicode with side effects, the problem of deceptive or unintended use is exceedingly high in Unicode.

With far too many special cases to hold in human working memory, or even reasonably within most code-bases.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com