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From: anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: python text, Byte Addressability And Beyond
Date: Mon, 27 May 2024 06:25:28 GMT
Organization: Institut fuer Computersprachen, Technische Universitaet Wien
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:
>On Sun, 12 May 2024 16:12:26 GMT, Anton Ertl wrote:
>
>> Plus at some point (not sure when) they decided that characters have to
>> be composable ...
>
>I think that was true right from the beginning. Else you would have had a 
>combinatorial explosion of alphabetic characters with diacritic marks.

Unicode has precomposed variants of the Latin characters that are used
in normal text.  It does not have a precomposed character for, e.g.,
K̖̈, but then such a character does not occur in normal text.

Unicode 1.0 with its expansion to 16-bit code units only makes sense
if the resulting code units are characters.  If at that point they had
planned to have variable-width characters, they could have gone with
something like UTF-8 from the start and spared us a lot of pain.

- anton
-- 
'Anyone trying for "industrial quality" ISA should avoid undefined behavior.'
  Mitch Alsup, <c17fcd89-f024-40e7-a594-88a85ac10d20o@googlegroups.com>