Text-mode apps (Was :Who are the "spacists"?)

[Rick Johnson]

On Sunday, March 26, 2017 at 1:21:18 PM UTC-5, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 27, 2017 at 4:43 AM, Steve D'Aprano
> <steve+python at pearwood.info> wrote:

> [...] So, for instance, Eryk Sun commented that my rounded
> box example didn't render correctly in all fonts - but in
> the future, a new version of those fonts could be released,
> adding support for those characters. We *know* that the
> code points I used are permanently and irrevocably
> allocated to the purposes I used them for, so we can all be
> confident that they'll be used correctly if at all.

You place a lot of faith in the supposed "immutability of
Unicode code points", but a lot people have placed a lot of
faith in many past and current encoding systems, only to be
bamboozled by the gatekeepers some time later.

> > That's not quite right. Unicode includes 137000 or so
> > Private Use Characters, which anyone can define for their
> > own purposes, "by private agreement". There's an
> > unofficial registry of such private use characters here:

And so, although Unicode was created to solve the endless
compatibility problems between multiple archaic encoding
systems, the designers thought it necessary to add a "custom
space" that will keep the incompatibilities on life support.
Smart. *REALLY* smart. And people _wonder_ why Dylan was a
disgruntled laureate...