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

[John Colvin via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 18 April 2015 at 17:50:12 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 4/18/2015 4:35 AM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>> \u0301 is the "combining acute accent" [1].
>>
>> [1] http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/0301/index.htm
>
> I won't deny what the spec says, but it doesn't make any sense 
> to have two different representations of eacute, and I don't 
> know why anyone would use the two code point version.

é might be obvious, but Unicode isn't just for writing European 
prose. Uses for combining characters includes (but is *nowhere* 
near to limited to) mathematical notation, where the 
combinatorial explosion of possible combinations that still 
belong to one grapheme cluster (character is a familiar but 
misleading word when talking about Unicode) would trivially 
become an insanely (more atoms than in the universe levels of) 
large number of characters.

Unicode is a nightmarish system in some ways, but considering how 
incredibly difficult the problem it solves is, it's actually not 
too crazy.