TIL the assumption that string length does not change when upper-cased is false

Re:TIL the assumption that string length does not change whe... by dotancohen on Monday November 22, 2021 @10:41AM (#29307556)

  > Do you see any issues?

The only real issue that I see is that ﻻ is considered to be two letters, even if it is a single codepoint or grapheme.

Regarding שַלוֹם I personally would consider it to be four letters, but the culture associated with that script (my culture) enjoys dissecting even the shape of the lines of the letters to look for meaning, I'm willing to bet that I'll find someone who will argue it to be six for the context he needs it to be. That's why I mentioned it.

  > In Japanese, which I am more familiar with, maybe it’s similar to ゙,

Yes, for the Hebrew example, I believe so. If you're really interested, it would be more akin to our voicing mark dagesh, which e.g. turns V ב into B בּ and F פ into P פּ.‎

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Re:TIL the assumption that string length does not change whe... by JohnHaugeland on Monday November 22, 2021 @03:13PM (#29311082)

Wait'll you find out that whether ß is one letter or two varies based on which brand of German you're drinking.

Programmers should understand that it doesn't matter if they think the thousands of years of language rules are irrational; Unicode either handles them or it's wrong.

Unicode doesn't exist to standardize the world's languages to a representation that programmers enjoy. It exists to encode all the world's languages *as they are*.

Whether you are sympathetic to the rules of foreign languages isn't super relevant in practice.

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Re:TIL the assumption that string length does not change whe... by dotancohen on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @01:44AM (#29315186)

  > Unicode doesn't exist to standardize the world's languages to a
  > representationthat programmers enjoy. It exists to encode all
  > the world's languages *as they are*.

Thank you for this terrific quote that I'm going to have to upset managers and clients with. This is the eloquence that I've been striving to express for a decade.

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Re:TIL the assumption that string length does not change whe... by JohnHaugeland on Tuesday November 23, 2021 @02:08AM (#29315331)

Very kind words. Thank you.

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