Fix Phobos dependencies on autodecoding

Walter Bright newshound2 at digitalmars.com
Thu Aug 15 22:21:32 UTC 2019


On 8/15/2019 2:38 PM, ag0aep6g wrote:
> On 15.08.19 21:54, Walter Bright wrote:
>> Unicode also fouled up by adding semantic information that is invisible to the 
>> rendering. It should have stuck with the Unicode<=>print round-trip not losing 
>> information.
>>
>> Naturally, people have already used such to trick people, track people, etc.
> 
> 'I' and 'l' are (virtually) identical in many fonts.

That's a problem with some fonts, not the concept. When such fonts are used, the 
distinguishment comes from the context, not the symbol itself.

On the other hand, the Unicode spec itself routinely shows identical glyphs for 
different code points.

Consider also:

    (800)555-1212

You know it's a phone number, because of the context. The digits used in are NOT 
actually numbers, they do not have any mathematical properties. Should Unicode 
have a separate code point for these?

The point is, the meaning of the symbol comes from its context, not the symbol 
itself. This is the fundamental error Unicode made.


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