Grapheme clusters, a.k.a.real characters

[Rick Johnson]

On Tuesday, July 18, 2017 at 10:24:54 PM UTC-5, Steve D'Aprano wrote:
> On Wed, 19 Jul 2017 10:08 am, Ben Finney wrote:
> 
> > Gregory Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> writes:
> > 
> > > The term "emoji" is becoming rather strained these days.
> > > The idea of "woman" and "personal computer" being
> > > emotions is an interesting one...
> > 
> > I think of “emoji” as “not actually a character in any
> > system anyone would use for writing anything, but somehow
> > gets to squat in the Unicode space”.
> 
> Blame the Japanese mobile phone manufacturers. They want to
> include emoji in their SMSes and phone chat software, [...]
> I suppose that having a standard for emoji is good. I'm not
> convinced that Unicode should be that standard, but on the
> other hand if we agree that Unicode should support
> hieroglyphics and pictographs, well, that's exactly what
> emoji are.

Indeed. 

And here are some insightful lyrics by the great R. Waters
(modified slightly) that you might consider:
    
    If you should go skating,
    on the thin ice of "modern-string life".
    Dragging behind you the giant repos,
    of the "million... code-point-strife".
    Don't be surprised when a crack in the ice,
    appears under your feet.
    You step of out your ASCII and out of your mind,
    with your pragmatism flowing out behind you,
    as you *CLAW* the thin ice!
    
Yeah. 

It's a cautionary tale.