Re: OT: Unicode 5.0

\> > Unicode certainly has fudged a bunch of stuff up initially, and
> > unfortunately they can't fix it now.
> They *could* fix it, by the same act of administrative fiat that created
> Unicode in the first place:
<cough>Ido<cough>

It took an age for Unicode to even start to catch on; now that it's
practically mainstream it would be pure foolhardiness to try to switch
to a new standard.  Everyone would cry foul and go their own way.

I see no harm in letting Unicode have extra, unneeded characters.  You
need rules for dealing with composing and decomposing anyway, so it
doesn't really hurt to have a LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH CIRCUMFLEX
in addition to LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A and COMBINING CIRCUMFLEX ABOVE
(or whatever the actual names are).

Also, a lot of the redundancy comes from the design goal of round-trip
preservation of the contents of documents in a national character set
when converted to Unicode and then back.  I think that's a worthwhile
goal from a computational standpoint.

And a lot of the acceptability of Unicode comes from the fact that its
a strict superset of Latin-1 which is,  in turn, a strict superset of
ASCII.  Your rearrangement loses that and thereby instantly loses many
current Unicode adopters.


--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>

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