UTF-8 Unicode operators vs digraphs

[Dlighted]

On Saturday, 15 August 2026 at 15:11:10 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> This is where you're still not getting the point.
>
> In English, the difference between italic A and upright A is a 
> font choice.
>
> In Cyrillic the difference between т and m is also a font 
> choice.
>
> You're trying to say that т and m must be different codepoints 
> because they have different shapes.  That's no different from 
> saying that italic A and upright A must have different 
> codepoints because they are different shapes.
>
> If you say that upright A and italic A are a font choice, then 
> you must also admit that the difference between т and m are 
> also a font choice, and therefore т and m must share the same 
> codepoint.
>
> So, which one is it?  You can't have it both ways.

I bet you're confusing him even more. I'll put it this way:

- For writing to humans freedom is generally desirable. Even if 
you hate it, other people aren't all programmers. For them 
typography and culture may matter. Fail to cover it and you just 
have Unicode codepages.

- In the context of identifiers, if you wanted to prevent 
confusion of _potential_ lookalikes, you'd have to discriminate 
against specific languages/script/ranges/code-points and 
combination marks or whitelist certain ranges/code-points. 
However by choosing ASCII you are doing the same thing, since 
ASCII barely covers English. (Yes, I get it. Walter Bright would 
make O and 0 the same character. Just don't start words with O 
and it won't be a problem, right?)

Unicode is extremely large and ASCII is extremely small. If I go 
into the supermarket, most items are trash I don't even look at 
or not interesting to me for various reasons. However there are 
still interesting things that aren't bad which I don't have in my 
fridge.