On Sat, Apr 9, 2016 at 3:44 AM, Marko Rauhamaa <ma...@pacujo.net> wrote: > Unicode heroically and definitively solved the problems ASCII had posed > but introduced a bag of new, trickier problems. > > (As for ligatures, I understand that there might be quite a bit of > legacy software that dedicated code points and code pages for ligatures. > Translating that legacy software to Unicode was made more > straightforward by introducing analogous codepoints to Unicode. Unicode > has quite many such codepoints: µ, K, Ω etc.)
More specifically, Unicode solved the problems that *codepages* had posed. And one of the principles of its design was that every character in every legacy encoding had a direct representation as a Unicode codepoint, allowing bidirectional transcoding for compatibility. Perhaps if Unicode had existed from the dawn of computing, we'd have less characters; but backward compatibility is way too important to let a narrow purity argument sway it. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list