UTF-8 Unicode operators vs digraphs

[H. S. Teoh]

On Fri, Aug 14, 2026 at 08:27:43AM +0000, Dlighted via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Friday, 14 August 2026 at 07:54:51 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> > However, a _lot_ of the stupidy of Unicode comes from the insanity
> > of natural languages. English has its problems, but when it comes to
> > encoding characters, it's downright trivial in comparison to a
> > number of other languages and writing systems (e.g. Cyrillic and
> > Arabic as you mentioned).
> Cyrillic has identical complexity as the Latin alphabet. Not any more
> or less.
> Arabic and Hebrew on the other hand uniquely stand out in complexity
> among all languages in the world by constantly demanding bidirectional
> text support in everything.

You forgot Chinese.  Each character is composed of any number of
radicals, including other characters, in completely arbitrary 2D layouts
with completely arbitrary distortions and simplifications to shoehorn
everything into a square block. (Look up "Biangbiang noodles" in
Wikipedia sometime, for laughs.)  Unicode literally threw up its hands
and embraced the combinatorial explosion instead of trying to reason
with it. :-D

Natural languages are totally insane.  For all its warts and
infelicities Unicode is doing not too bad of a job keeping things
*relatively* internationalizable.  At least, it's doing a LOT better
than the bad ole days of per-language codepages, where everybody and his
mother's dog could invent their own codepage, and text-processing
software broke in spectacular ways because you never knew which codepage
a string snippet belonged to.  It was the wild, wild west.  That Unicode
managed to emerge from that mess and unify everything is no mean feat,
warts and wrong decisions notwithstanding.


T

-- 
No! I'm not in denial!