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Comment by zabzonk | Hacker News Reader

> Unicode is a requirement everywhere human language is used

Strange then how it was not a requirement for many, many years.

Oh, it was. It was fun being unable to type a euro sign or the name Seán without it being garbled. Neither were matched quotation marks, and arguably computer limitations killed off naïve and café too.

Don’t confuse people groaning and putting up with limitations as justifying those limitations.

In Portugal it always was, that is why we got to use eh for é, ah for á, he for è, c, for ç and many other tricks.

Shared by other European languages, like ou for ö in German, kalimera for καλημέρα, and so on all around the world in non-English speaking countries during the early days of computing.

It was a mess back then though. Unicode fixed that.

I'm not convinced that Unicode fixed anything. I was kind of hoping, way back when, that everyone would adopt ASCII, as a step to a more united world. But things seem to have got more differentiated, and made things much more difficult.

The options were never ASCII or unicode though. Before unicode we had ASCII + lots of different incompatible encodings that relied on metadata to be properly rendered. That's what unicode fixed

Besides I like being able to put things like →, €, ∞ or ∆ into text. With ascii a lot of things that are nowadays trivial would need markup languages

For whom? Certainly not any of the humans trying to use the computer.

Or rather, computers had inadequate support.

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