. Peter Constable wrote, > James: > > > Inside a program, for instance... > > This is *very* faulty logic. ...
Jeepers! > ... Variable names exist in source code only, > and have nothing whatsoever to do with the data actually processed. Exactly. Variable names are always internal while data may be external. > You're also referring to an assigned character in your example, not a > PUA codepoint. ... > Since it was supposed to draw a correlation between "ASCII-conformant" and Unicode-conformant, an assigned ASCII character was used in the example. After all, ASCII didn't have much to offer in the way of Private Use Areas or unassigned code points. > A software product could assign every single PUA codepoint to mean some > kind of formatting instruction, and insert these into the text like > markup. In that case, a user's PUA characters will be re-interpreted by > that software as formatting instructions. HTML manages to use ASCII characters as formatting mark-up yet still allows ASCII text to be processed as expected. Briefly, it's my opinion that applications which claim to support and comply with Unicode should not 'step on' Unicode text. Any loopholes in the 'letter of the law' which allow applications to mung or reject Unicode text should be plugged. Best regards, James Kass .
