[jmusall]

The fact is that there were so many character sets in use before Unicode because all these things were needed or at least wanted by a lot of people. Here's a great blog post by Nikita Prokopov about it: https://tonsky.me/blog/unicode/

[WalterBright]

Sometimes you gotta say no. Trying to please every hare brained idea leads to madness.

Normalized code point sequences are another WTF feature.

[jmusall]

Of course! I bet there are tons of ideas that didn't make it into Unicode, for better of worse. Where you draw the line is kind of arbitrary. You, personally, can of course opt out of all of that by restricting yourself to ASCII only, for example. But the rest of the world will continue to use Unicode.

[WalterBright]

> restricting yourself to ASCII only

My early compilers used code pages to work with Japanese, French and German customers. The original idea of Unicode was absolutely brilliant and I was all for it. D was an early total adopter of Unicode (C and C++ followed years later). I rejected code page support for D.

It's mission was to support all the letters in all the languages, which was a good straightforward mission. But then came fonts, formatting, layout, rendering, casing, sort ordering, normalization, combining, vote-for-my-letter-and-Ill-vote-for-yours, emoji, icons, semantic meanings, elvish, people who invent things and campaign to put them in so they'll leave a mark in history, ...