On Friday, May 2, 2014 5:03:21 AM UTC+5:30, MRAB wrote: > On 2014-05-01 23:38, Terry Reedy wrote: > > On 5/1/2014 2:04 PM, Rustom Mody wrote: > >>>> Since its Unicode-troll time, here's my contribution > >>>> http://blog.languager.org/2014/04/unicode-and-unix-assumption.html > > I will not comment on the Unix-assumption part, but I think you go wrong > > with this: "Unicode is a Headache". The major headache is that unicode > > and its very few encodings are not universally used. The headache is all > > the non-unicode legacy encodings still being used. So you better title > > this section 'Non-Unicode is a Headache'. > [snip] > I think he's right when he says "Unicode is a headache", but only > because it's being used to handle languages which are, themselves, a > "headache": left-to-right versus right-to-left, sometimes on the same > line; diacritics, possibly several on a glyph; etc.
Yes, the headaches go a little further back than Unicode. There is a certain large old book... 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. I dont know how one causally connects the 'headaches' but Ive seen - mojibake - unicode 'number-boxes' (what are these called?) - Worst of all what we *dont* see -- how many others dont see what we see? I never knew of any of this in the good ol days of ASCII ¶ Passive voice is often the best choice in the interests of political correctness It would be a pleasant surprise if everyone sees a pilcrow at start of line above -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list