Comment by chrismorgan

:) isn’t load-bearing syntax. != is.

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Fun fact: the King James Version of the Bible uses “:)” 37 times (e.g. Matthew 24:15) and “;)” 53 times (e.g. Deuteronomy 4:31).

I’ve had auto-emojification of character sequences like :) cause problems on more than one occasion, e.g. in things like copying logs and getting them mangled. I strongly oppose those sorts of transformations being applied willy-nilly. Converting :) into U+1F642 or similar at authoring time is OK, so long as I can turn it off, but doing it blindly causes enough problems and helps little enough that it just shouldn’t be done any more, not when most devices have ready access to actual emoji input.