samatman 4 days ago

Rare WalterBright L taken in that thread.

Sure, Unicode isn't the Platonic ideal of a character encoding. It has warts, legacy features, and.. and it is a universal encoding of all human writing. What an exceptional and incredible accomplishment.

Could you replace it with something better designed?

No. No, you cannot. You can in principle design something better, but that's a completely different, quixotic, and useless task.

It's also far from impossible to implement Unicode 'correctly', folks not only can, but do, routinely. It's extensively well documented, there's example code, it's just work.

Also, if your game plan for Unicode-D includes removing the most beloved and consistently demanded feature, emoji: then no, that person in particular is not capable even in principle of designing something better. That game has been lost before it began.

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zzo38computer 3 days ago

> and it is a universal encoding of all human writing

It isn't (and never can be).

> Could you replace it with something better designed? No. No, you cannot. You can in principle design something better,

Something that some people fail to consider, is that one character set is not suitable for all purposes. Unicode is not very good for most purposes though. I think Extended TRON Code has many advantages, although trying to use Extended TRON Code (or some other alternative) for everything would be almost as bad as using Unicode for everything, but in different ways.

> Also, if your game plan for Unicode-D includes removing the most beloved and consistently demanded feature, emoji

I think that colourful emoji should not belong in the character set for text. I also do not want colourful emoji on my computer.