Unicode 7

[MRAB]

On 2014-05-02 03:39, Ben Finney wrote:
> Rustom Mody <rustompmody at gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Yes, the headaches go a little further back than Unicode.
>
> Okay, so can you change your article to reflect the fact that the
> headaches both pre-date Unicode, and are made much easier by Unicode?
>
>> There is a certain large old book...
>
> Ah yes, the neo-Sumerian story “Enmerkar_and_the_Lord_of_Aratta”
> <URL:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enmerkar_and_the_Lord_of_Aratta>.
> Probably inspired by stories older than that, of course.
>
>> In which is described the building of a 'tower that reached up to heaven'...
>> At which point 'it was decided'¶ to do something to prevent that.
>> And our headaches started.
>
> And other myths with fantastic reasons for the diversity of language
> <URL:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythical_origins_of_language>.
>
>> I never knew of any of this in the good ol days of ASCII
>
> Yes, by ignoring all other writing systems except one's own – and
> thereby excluding most of the world's people – the system can be made
> simpler.
>
ASCII lacked even £. I can remember assembly listings in magazines
containing lines such as:

     LDA £0

I even (vaguely) remember an advert with a character that looked like
Ł, presumably because they didn't have £. In a UK magazine? Very
strange!

> Hopefully the proportion of programmers who still feel they can make
> such a parochial choice is rapidly shrinking.
>