On 7/17/2011 2:47 AM, Petr Tomasek wrote:
On Sun, Jul 17, 2011 at 10:14:55AM +0100, Julian Bradfield wrote:
Wouldn't it be more economical to encode a single UNICODE ESCAPE
CHARACTER which forces the following character to be interpreted as a
printable glyph rather than any control function?
I already thought about this but this would probably mean that
algorithms (like the Unicode BiDi Algorithm) would have to be changed.
Change that to: it would mean that ALL algorithms that interpret any of
the invisible characters would have to change.
The reason is, of course, because these codes would *reinterpret*
existing characters. You could argue that Variation Selectors do the
same, but they are carefully constructed so that they can be safely
ignored. These suggested character couldn't be safely ignored, because
doing so would have control/formatting codes in the middle of text where
none were intended.
Michael has it right:
On 7/17/2011 2:35 AM, Michael Everson wrote:
... invisible and stateful control characters are more expensive than ordinary
graphic symbols.
In this case, the expense is so much higher as to rule out such an idea
from the start.
A./
PS: this doesn't mean that adding graphic symbols is the foregone thing
to do, only that, if evidence points to the need to address this issue
in character encoding, then, using graphic symbols is the better way to
go about it.
