UTF-8 Unicode operators vs digraphs

[Walter Bright]

On 8/13/2026 12:20 AM, Dlighted wrote:
> It is unavoidable for letters from different scripts to look the same in some 
> fonts when supporting many scripts.

What Unicode has done wrong is attach semantic meaning to code points. This is 
all wrong. When you read a printed page, the semantic meaning depends on the 
context, not the glyph.

For example, there is the letter 'a' and the mathematical variable 'a'. They are 
different code points, but they are identical. Have you ever read a math book 
and had trouble distinguishing the two? I haven't.

'a' can have endless semantic meanings depending on the context. Unicode trying 
to assign different code points to them is hopeless and makes Unicode more or 
less unusable.

> I guess you'd have to _normalize_ them to find out.

Normalizing in Unicode means two different code points represent the same code 
point.

Bottom line: you should be able to print a page written in Unicode, then OCR it 
and get back the same Unicode text (at least for the non-blank points). Instead, 
we have Unicode that means one thing to the human reader and something totally 
different to a computer reading it.