> Encoding characters that look the same but behave differently is a bad idea.
I see. I don't have a good argument against this, except what I've already said. But what about the idea to create a control character that makes the preceding character mirror? Oh..: > Unicode also has some magic invisible control characters that were supposed > to change the behavior of affected characters in ways that violated their > identity. These control codes are Deprecated with prejudice. Any examples? I wonder what you mean by "violated their identity". > How about telling them that changing the visual direction of any arrow is a > no-no(*) and if you transform text, you need to ensure that it stays as > intended? Yeah, this is exactly what I want to tell them. But how do you ensure that the direction stays as intended when you don't have the option to do so? This proposal is about creating that option. See the Discourse link. Right now the only way to ensure the text stays as intended is to not transform "->" to "→" at all. But that's a neat feature, and I don't think anyone would be convinced to remove it from the software because it's sometimes wrong - from their point of view, very rarely wrong. (From a RTL user's point of view, always wrong).
