On Friday, 3 June 2016 at 10:08:43 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 6/3/2016 1:05 AM, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
At the time
Unicode also had to grapple with tricky issues like what to do
with
lookalike characters that served different purposes or had
different
meanings, e.g., the mu sign in the math block vs. the real
letter mu in
the Greek block, or the Cyrillic A which looks and behaves
exactly like
the Latin A, yet the Cyrillic Р, which looks like the Latin P,
does
*not* mean the same thing (it's the equivalent of R), or the
Cyrillic В
whose lowercase is в not b, and also had a different sound, but
lowercase Latin b looks very similar to Cyrillic ь, which
serves a
completely different purpose (the uppercase is Ь, not B, you
see).
I don't see that this is tricky at all. Adding additional
semantic meaning that does not exist in printed form was
outside of the charter of Unicode. Hence there is no
justification for having two distinct characters with identical
glyphs.
That's not right either. Cyrillic letters can look slightly
different from their latin lookalikes in some circumstances.
I'm sure there are extremely good reasons for not using the latin
lookalikes in the Cyrillic alphabets, because most (all?) 8-bit
Cyrillic encodings use separate codes for the lookalikes. It's
not restricted to Unicode.
