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by WalterBright 102 days ago
> So you think that the letters in the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets which are printed identically to the Latin A should not exist?

Yes. Unicode should not be about semantic meaning, it should be about the visual. Like text in a book.

> And, for example, Greek words containing this letter should be encoded with a mix of Latin and Greek characters?

Yup. Consider a printed book. How can you tell if a letter is a Greek letter or a Latin letter?

Those Unicode homonyms are a solution looking for a problem.
4 comments
bawolff 101 days ago
> Yes. Unicode should not be about semantic meaning, it should be about the visual. Like text in a book.

Do you think 1, l and I should be encoded as the same character, or does this logic only extend to characters pesky foreigners use.

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WalterBright 101 days ago
They are visually distinct to the reader.
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debazel 101 days ago
That is entirely dependent on the font.
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Yokohiii 102 days ago
Unicode is about semantics not appearance. If you don't need semantics then use something different.
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WalterBright 101 days ago
> Unicode is about semantics not appearance.

And that's where it went off the rails into lala land. 'a' can have all kinds of distinct meanings. How are you going to make that work? It's hopeless.

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Yokohiii 101 days ago
It already works.

Tell me what the problem is and what your proposed solution would be.

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WalterBright 101 days ago
Infer the meaning from the context.

    a) it's a bullet point
    b) a+b means a is a variable
    c) apple means a means the sound "aaaah"
    d) ape means a means the sound "aye"
    e) 0xa means a means "10"
    f) "a" on my test paper means I did well on it
    g) grade "a" means I bought the good bolts
    h) "achtung" means it's a German "a"
I didn't need 8 different Unicode characters. And so on.
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Yokohiii 101 days ago
Your trolling is really rock bottom. All this already works fine. Millions of times, each day. Just once a week it fails because someone messed up. Not an issue.
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WalterBright 101 days ago
I showed that there is no need for semantic information about the glyphs. It's more compelling to demonstrate a need for semantic information rather than just asserting it.
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Muromec 102 days ago
>Yup. Consider a printed book. How can you tell if a letter is a Greek letter or a Latin letter?

I can absolutely tell Cyrillic k from the lating к and latin u from the Cyrillic и.

>should not be about semantic meaning,

It's always better to be able to preserve more information in a text and not less.

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WalterBright 101 days ago
> I can absolutely tell Cyrillic k from the lating к and latin u from the Cyrillic и.

They look visually distinct to me. I don't get your point.

> It's always better to be able to preserve more information in a text and not less.

Text should not lose information by printing it and then OCR'ing it.

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ted_dunning 101 days ago
But these characters only look identical in some fonts. Are you saying that if you change font, some characters in a string should change appearance and others should not?

And what about the round-trip rule?

And ligatures? Aren't those a semantic distinction?

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WalterBright 101 days ago
> But these characters only look identical in some fonts.

That's a problem with the fonts.

> And what about the round-trip rule?

Print Unicode on paper, then ocr it, and you'll get different Unicode. Oh, and normalization.

> ligatures

Generally an issue with rendering.

> semantic distinction

Unicode isn't about semantics (or shouldn't be). Consider 'a'. It's used for all kinds of meanings.

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