On 5/22/2012 2:22 AM, Michael Everson wrote:
On 22 May 2012, at 06:13, Asmus Freytag wrote:
Before this discussion deep ends.
There is an early precedent, going back to the Euro sign, of Unicode adding a new
character instead of "repurposing" any existing character that may seem to be
unused.
The principle there is, that until a particular currency gets actually created (or a
specific symbol is officially adopted for an existing currency) whatever character
already exists in Unicode is for "something else". It may be unclear precisely
what it is to be used for, but it is clear that it is *not* to be used for the new symbol.
So, there's absolutely no point in discussing whether or not some glyphs should
change - that's flat out.
I would not agree about that in terms of a future re-use of the Drachma sign.
The glyph we have is absurd, based on a Wingding, no less!
The sign that was prematurely added for the Euro is equally absurd.
A set of hundreds of thousands of characters will accrue some
absurdities (the CJK set is full of them..)
What to do about that is to prevent these things from happening, not by
retroactively re-designating characters.
The identity of symbols, and that includes currency symbols, is largely defined by
appearance, much more so, than is the case for letter shapes. Changing "glyphs"
for a symbol really means changing its *identity*, and that goes against the character
code stability policy in a rather direct way.
Sometimes. Sometimes not.
I'd say, pretty much all the time - with very rare exceptions (such as
the one mentioned by me in the PS).
A./
