Today's programming challenge - How's your Range-Fu ?

[Abdulhaq via Digitalmars-d]

MiOn Sunday, 19 April 2015 at 02:20:01 UTC, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
> On 18/04/15 21:40, Walter Bright wrote:
>>
>> I'm not arguing against the existence of the Unicode standard, 
>> I'm
>> saying I can't figure any justification for standardizing 
>> different
>> encodings of the same thing.
>>
>
> A lot of areas in Unicode are due to pre-Unicode legacy.
>
> I'm guessing here, but looking at the code points, é (U00e9 - 
> Latin small letter E with acute), which comes from Latin-1, 
> which is designed to follow ISO-8859-1. U0301 (Combining acute 
> accent) comes from "Combining diacritical marks".
>
> The way I understand things, Unicode would really prefer to use 
> U0065+U0301 rather than U00e9. Because of legacy systems, and 
> because they would rather have the ISO-8509 code pages be 1:1 
> mappings, rather than 1:n mappings, they introduced code points 
> they really would rather do without.
>
> This also explains the "presentation forms" code pages (e.g. 
> http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/UFB00.pdf). These were 
> intended to be glyphs, rather than code points. Due to legacy 
> reasons, it was not possible to simply discard them. They 
> received code points, with a warning not to use these code 
> points directly.
>
> Also, notice that some letters can only be achieved using 
> multiple code points. Hebrew diacritics, for example, do not, 
> typically, have a composite form. My name fully spelled (which 
> you rarely would do), שַׁחַר, cannot be represented with less 
> than 6 code points, despite having only three letters.
>
> The last paragraph isn't strictly true. You can use UFB2C + 
> U05B7 for the first letter instead of U05E9 + U05C2 + U05B7. 
> You would be using the presentation form which, as pointed 
> above, is only there for legacy.
>
> Shachar
> or shall I say
> שחר

Yes Arabic is similar too