Unicode 7

[Ben Finney]

Rustom Mody <rustompmody at gmail.com> writes:

> Yes, the headaches go a little further back than Unicode.

Okay, so can you change your article to reflect the fact that the
headaches both pre-date Unicode, and are made much easier by Unicode?

> There is a certain large old book...

Ah yes, the neo-Sumerian story “Enmerkar_and_the_Lord_of_Aratta”
<URL:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enmerkar_and_the_Lord_of_Aratta>.
Probably inspired by stories older than that, of course.

> In which is described the building of a 'tower that reached up to heaven'...
> At which point 'it was decided'¶ to do something to prevent that.
> And our headaches started.

And other myths with fantastic reasons for the diversity of language
<URL:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythical_origins_of_language>.

> I never knew of any of this in the good ol days of ASCII

Yes, by ignoring all other writing systems except one's own – and
thereby excluding most of the world's people – the system can be made
simpler.

Hopefully the proportion of programmers who still feel they can make
such a parochial choice is rapidly shrinking.

-- 
 \     “Why doesn't Python warn that it's not 100% perfect? Are people |
  `\         just supposed to “know” this, magically?” —Mitya Sirenef, |
_o__)                                     comp.lang.python, 2012-12-27 |
Ben Finney