[ubershmekel]

> Unicode is a horrible scam, the worst thing to happen to digital language representation.

> They baldly admit that Unicode is not good for drawing Arabic

> Consider the "Base-4 fractions in Telugu" [...] any software that wants to use them properly will require some code to translate to and from numbers in the computer to Telugu sequences of those graphics.

Written language is hard to represent, encode and draw. You admit that Unicode&utf8 got 2 out of 3 right yet you call it a scam.

Your complaint is a scam and a horrible trollism.

[carapace]

When I'm trolling you'll know it. I have a point, I believe it's a good point, and I'm making it.

For languages that can be represented as a sequence of little pictures Unicode is a little better than ASCII. For the rest, it's a scam: We tell people that we have a way of dealing with human languages in computers but it's half-baked, born in ignorance, and all the grotty details are papered over, but you can write PIZZA SLICE or POOP now, so fuck it, ship it.

Represent: "Astral Plane"? What does that have to do with a standard catalog mapping numbers to pictures? I feel Unicode messes that up.

Encoding: UTF-8 is near perfect, 'nuff said. Ken Thompson and Rob Pike doing their thing.

Drawing: Doesn't even begin to touch it really.

Unicode is a nasty little black hole that's sucking up time and other resources and not really solving the problem.

[mixmastamyk]

I think that's too negative. Is Unicode perfect? Of course not, but it's the best we've got for now. Just as Morse, Baudot, or ASCII were the best approximations at one point in time.

It's a hard problem and will take decades to for the right solutions/implementations to present themselves. Surely one day there will be an improved successor to Unicode. Things are a lot better than they were even ten years ago, however.

[carapace]

Yeah, sorry, I was pretty cranky last night. Please see my reply to simonh in this thread a few minutes ago. (I'm basically agreeing with you.)