On 6/3/2016 11:17 PM, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
On Fri, Jun 03, 2016 at 08:03:16PM -0700, Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d wrote:
It works for books.
Because books don't allow their readers to change the font.
Unicode is not the font.
This madness already exists *without* Unicode. If you have a page with a
single glyph 'm' printed on it and show it to an English speaker, he
will say it's lowercase M. Show it to a Russian speaker, and he will say
it's lowercase Т. So which letter is it, M or Т?
It's not a problem that Unicode can solve. As you said, the meaning is in the
context. Unicode has no context, and tries to solve something it cannot.
('m' doesn't always mean m in english, either. It depends on the context.)
Ya know, if Unicode actually solved these problems, you'd have a case. But it
doesn't, and so you don't :-)
If you're going to represent both languages, you cannot get away from
needing to represent letters abstractly, rather than visually.
Books do visually just fine!
So should O and 0 share the same glyph or not? They're visually the same
thing,
No, they're not. Not even on old typewriters where every key was expensive. Even
without the slash, the O tends to be fatter than the 0.
The very fact that we distinguish between O and 0, independently of what
Unicode did/does, is already proof enough that going by visual
representation is inadequate.
Except that you right now are using a font where they are different enough that
you have no trouble at all distinguishing them without bothering to look it up.
And so am I.
In other words toUpper and toLower does not belong in the standard
library. Great.
Unicode and the standard library are two different things.
