Updating D beyond Unicode 2.0

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Saturday, September 22, 2018 6:37:09 AM MDT Steven Schveighoffer via 
Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 9/22/18 4:52 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> >> 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.
> But aren't some (many?) Chinese/Japanese characters representing whole
> words?

It's true that they're not characters in the sense that Roman characters are
characters, but they're still part of the alphabets for those languages.
Emojis are specifically formed from sequences of characters - e.g. :) is two
characters which are already expressible on their own. They're meant to
represent a smiley face, but it's a sequence of characters already. There's
no need whatsoever to represent anything extra Unicode. It's already enough
of a disaster that there are multiple ways to represent the same character
in Unicode without nonsense like emojis. It's stuff like this that really
makes me wish that we could come up with a new standard that would replace
Unicode, but that's likely a pipe dream at this point.

- Jonathan M Davis