Updating D beyond Unicode 2.0

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Friday, September 21, 2018 10:54:59 PM MDT Joakim via Digitalmars-d 
wrote:
> I'm torn. I completely agree with Adam and others that people
> should be able to use any language they want. But the Unicode
> spec is such a tire fire that I'm leery of extending support for
> it.

Unicode identifiers may make sense in a code base that is going to be used
solely by a group of developers who speak a particular language that uses a
number a of non-ASCII characters (especially languages like Chinese or
Japanese), but it has no business in any code that's intended for
international use. It just causes problems. At best, a particular, regional
keyboard may be able to handle a particular symbol, but most other keyboards
won't be able too. So, using that symbol causes problems for all of the
developers from other parts of the world even if those developers also have
Unicode symbols in their native languages.

> Someone linked this Swift chapter on Unicode handling in an
> earlier forum thread, read the section on emoji in particular:
>
> https://oleb.net/blog/2017/11/swift-4-strings/
>
> I was laughing out loud when reading about composing "family"
> emojis with zero-width joiners. If you told me that was a tech
> parody, I'd have believed it.

Honestly, I was horrified to find out that emojis were even in Unicode. It
makes no sense whatsover. Emojis are supposed to be sequences of characters
that can be interepreted as images. Treating them like Unicode symbols is
like treating entire words like Unicode symbols. It's just plain stupid and
a clear sign that Unicode has gone completely off the rails (if it was ever
on them). Unfortunately, it's the best tool that we have for the job.

- Jonathan M Davis