The Case Against Autodecode

[Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d]

On 6/3/2016 1:05 AM, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> At the time
> Unicode also had to grapple with tricky issues like what to do with
> lookalike characters that served different purposes or had different
> meanings, e.g., the mu sign in the math block vs. the real letter mu in
> the Greek block, or the Cyrillic A which looks and behaves exactly like
> the Latin A, yet the Cyrillic Р, which looks like the Latin P, does
> *not* mean the same thing (it's the equivalent of R), or the Cyrillic В
> whose lowercase is в not b, and also had a different sound, but
> lowercase Latin b looks very similar to Cyrillic ь, which serves a
> completely different purpose (the uppercase is Ь, not B, you see).

I don't see that this is tricky at all. Adding additional semantic meaning that 
does not exist in printed form was outside of the charter of Unicode. Hence 
there is no justification for having two distinct characters with identical glyphs.

They should have put me in charge of Unicode. I'd have put a stop to much of the 
madness :-)