MiOn Sunday, 19 April 2015 at 02:20:01 UTC, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
On 18/04/15 21:40, Walter Bright wrote:
I'm not arguing against the existence of the Unicode standard,
I'm
saying I can't figure any justification for standardizing
different
encodings of the same thing.
A lot of areas in Unicode are due to pre-Unicode legacy.
I'm guessing here, but looking at the code points, é (U00e9 -
Latin small letter E with acute), which comes from Latin-1,
which is designed to follow ISO-8859-1. U0301 (Combining acute
accent) comes from "Combining diacritical marks".
The way I understand things, Unicode would really prefer to use
U0065+U0301 rather than U00e9. Because of legacy systems, and
because they would rather have the ISO-8509 code pages be 1:1
mappings, rather than 1:n mappings, they introduced code points
they really would rather do without.
This also explains the "presentation forms" code pages (e.g.
http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/UFB00.pdf). These were
intended to be glyphs, rather than code points. Due to legacy
reasons, it was not possible to simply discard them. They
received code points, with a warning not to use these code
points directly.
Also, notice that some letters can only be achieved using
multiple code points. Hebrew diacritics, for example, do not,
typically, have a composite form. My name fully spelled (which
you rarely would do), שַׁחַר, cannot be represented with less
than 6 code points, despite having only three letters.
The last paragraph isn't strictly true. You can use UFB2C +
U05B7 for the first letter instead of U05E9 + U05C2 + U05B7.
You would be using the presentation form which, as pointed
above, is only there for legacy.
Shachar
or shall I say
שחר
Yes Arabic is similar too
