Comment by Arnt
6 months ago
When do you think that first mistake happened?
(Pick a year, then think about why it didn't happen in that year.)
6 months ago
When do you think that first mistake happened?
(Pick a year, then think about why it didn't happen in that year.)
When Unicode was being specced out originally I guess. There was more interest in unifying characters at that stage (see also the far more controversial Han unification)
Uh-huh. At that time roundtrip compatiblity with all widely used 8-bit encodings was a major design criterion. Roundtrip meaning that you could take an input string in e.g. iso 8859-9, convert it to unicode, convert it back, and get the same string, still usable for purposes like database lookups. Would you have argued to break database lookups at the time?
ISO-8859-9 actually does have what I suggest:
FD/49 are lower/upper dotless ı/I
DD/69 are upper/lower dotted İ/i.
There's nothing around the capability to round trip that through unicode that required 49 in ISO-8859-9 to be assigned the same unicode codepoint as 49 in ISO-8859-1 because they happen to be visually identical
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