[sandreas]

You should have asked how they would encode the german currency sign (€ for euro) in ASCII or its german counterpart latin1/iso-8859-1...

It's not possible. However I bet they would argument to use iso-8859-15 (latin9 / latin0) with the international currency sign (¤) instead or insist that char 128 of latin1 is almost always meant as €, so just ignore the standard in these cases and use a new font.

This would only fail in older printers and who is still printing stuff these days? Nobody right?

Using real utf-8 is just too complex... All these emojis are nuts

[richardwhiuk]

EUR is the common answer.

[asddubs]

or just double all the numbers and use DM

[Y_Y]

Weirdly the old Deutsch Mark doesn't seem to have its own code point in the block start U+20A0, whereas the Spanish equivalent (Peseta, ₧, not just Pt) does.

[account42]

It's not a Unicode issue, there just isn't a dedicated symbol for it, everyone just used the letters DM. Unicode (at least back then) was mostly a superset of existing character sets and then distinct glyphs.

[Y_Y]

That would be a fine answer, but for the fact that other currencies like the rupee (₨) that are "just letters" do have their own codepoint. Being made up of two symbols doesn't necessarily make something not a symbols, in semiotics or in Unicode.

In fact this is one of the root problems, there are plenty of Unicode symbols you can make out of others, either juxtaposing or overstriking or using a combining character, but this isn't consistently done.

[tugu77]

TIL

https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/block/U+20A0

Even Bitcoin is there. And "German Penny Sign"?

[throw0101a]

> international currency sign (¤)

TIL:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_sign_(generic)

[account42]

UTF-8 is simple, it's Unicode that is complex.

[sandreas]

Besides UTF-8 is not that simple, it still was irony :-)