When was your day? Emoticons have been used in terminals since 1982

Emoticons are not the same as emojis. For one they allow for more expression or personal style by having different variants, e.g. :-) vs :) or for absolute maniacs: (:

They are also not limited to what some consortium and a couple of megacorporations think you should be able to express.

They also lack semantics. There are downsides as well as up.

Emojis also severely lack semantics. They are specified in terms of what they should visually depict, not what they are supposed to mean.

Usage rather than specifications determine semantics and due to the points in my previous post those often disagree for Unicode emojis.

I'm glad you recognise the value of usage when it comes to emoticons vs. emoji...

emoji lack clear semantics too, consider the eggplant.

I think there's a difference. The code point will always mean "eggplant", it just happens that the concept can be interpreted in different ways according to context—just like the word itself. But ":-)" can only ever mean "colon minus rparens" before further interpretation.

What’s it called is syntax, what it’s means is always context dependent. That’s why we invented formal notation, so that we can have context free interpretation (it’s bundled with its semantic so you don’t need to apply some context to it)

Actually, according to Unicode, "-" doesn't mean minus - U+002D is hyphen-minus.

And as for the eggplant, your semantics-as-specified are useless when 99.9% of the usage has a different intended meaning due to the inherent lack of expressiveness in a corporate-approved emoji language.

> or for absolute maniacs: (:

To be fair, Unicode allows for that variant too: https://emojipedia.org/upside-down-face

Agreed, but Unicode allows me to express the emotion that I most commonly feel when working in the IT industry: disapproval.

    ಠ_ಠ

Yes and that's still an emoticon made from creative use of pre-existing characters rather than an emoji specified in Unicode.

Really? So how did you understand each other, grandpa?

I heard they used to feel each others faces with their hands, like Hellen Keller, or with their mouths, like Mr. Peepers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QV2kaJ5_8PU

U+263A entered Unicode in 1993, afaik. Plan9 had utf8 support in the terminal back then!

This character was code 0x01 in the original IBM PC code page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437), and hence in DOS. It was displayed single-width and monochrome just like any other 8-bit character, never causing any rendering issues, unlike emojis today. It was added to Unicode for round-trip compatibility with that code page.

More background about how the smiley ended up in the IBM code page: https://www.vintagecomputing.com/index.php/archives/790/the-...

Single code point, monochrome and single space. So it didn't need to be handled differently than any other non-ASCII character.

BTW, it is emitted with the sequence `Compose` `:` `)` (if you have Compose-key support installed+enabled)

UTF-8 was developed by Rob Pike and Ken Thompson on a napkin in a diner and implemented in Pikes Plan 9 making it the first UTF-8 OS.

you'll need same complexity, sans multi-coloured glyphs, for any non-latin script anyway.