Philippe wrote:
> When I just look at the history of combining classes, they did not exist in
> the first Unicode standard, and they still don't exist in ISO10646 as well.
> This was a technology developed by IBM and offered for free to the community
Excuse me Philippe, but you are wrong. Please don't make such statements
without knowing what you are talking about. See the acknowledgement section
of Unicode 3.0 book for starters.
My recollection is that the idea of combining classes and standard
ordering originated with me while I was employed at NeXT in the early 1990s
to solve the problem of how to tell if two sequences should be
interepreted the same way. I may not invent much, but I do recall what I
invent. Somewhere buried in my garage I may still have drafts of the
original working papers I wrote, developed along algebraic lines. These
ideas were developed into the canonical equivalence algorithm by Mark
Davis, thence into the system you see today, including the forms of
normalization, etc.
Rick
