Fix Phobos dependencies on autodecoding

[H. S. Teoh]

On Thu, Aug 15, 2019 at 05:06:57PM -0600, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Thursday, August 15, 2019 4:59:45 PM MDT H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d 
> wrote:
[...]
> > Unicode does have some dark corners like that.[*]
[...]
> > [*] And some worse-than-dark-corners, like the whole codepage
> > dedicated to emoji *and* combining marks for said emoji that changes
> > their *appearance* -- something that ought not to have any place in
> > a character encoding scheme!  Talk about scope creep...
> 
> Considering that emojis are supposed to be pictures formed with
> letters (simple ASCII art basically), they have no business being part
> part of an encoding scheme in the first place - but having combining
> marks to change their appearance definitely makes it that much worse.
[...]

It's not just emojis; GUI icons are already a thing in Unicode.  If this
trend of encoding graphics in a string continues, in about a decade's
time we'll be able to reinvent Nethack with graphical tiles inside a
text mode terminal, using Unicode RPG icon "characters" which you can
animate by attaching various "combining diacritics".  It would be kewl.
But also utterly pointless and ridiculous.

(In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if you can already do this to some
extent using emojis and GUI icon "characters". Just add a few more
Unicode "characters" for in-game objects and a few more "diacritics" for
animation frames, and we're already there. Throw in a zero-width,
non-spacing "animation frame variant selector" "character", and we could
have an entire animation sequence encoded as a string. Who even needs
PNGs and animated SVGs anymore?!)


T

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