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.
Rule of thumb: two Unicode sequences that look identical when printed should consist of the same code points.
And, for example, Greek words containing this letter should be encoded with a mix of Latin and Greek characters?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tell me what the problem is and what your proposed solution would be.
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"
Do you think 1, l and I should be encoded as the same character, or does this logic only extend to characters pesky foreigners use.
And what about the round-trip rule?
And ligatures? Aren't those a semantic distinction?
That's a problem with the fonts.
> And what about the round-trip rule?
Print Unicode on paper, then ocr it, and you'll get different Unicode. Oh, and normalization.
> ligatures
Generally an issue with rendering.
> semantic distinction
Unicode isn't about semantics (or shouldn't be). Consider 'a'. It's used for all kinds of meanings.
While at it we could also unify I, | and l. It's too confusing sometimes.
They render differently, so it's not a problem.