On Sat, 9 Apr 2016 03:50:16 +1000, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Sat, Apr 9, 2016 at 3:44 AM, Marko Rauhamaa <ma...@pacujo.net> wrote: [snip] >> (As for ligatures, I understand that there might be quite a bit of >> legacy software that dedicated code points and code pages for ligatures. >> Translating that legacy software to Unicode was made more >> straightforward by introducing analogous codepoints to Unicode. Unicode >> has quite many such codepoints: µ, K, Ω etc.) > > More specifically, Unicode solved the problems that *codepages* had > posed. And one of the principles of its design was that every > character in every legacy encoding had a direct representation as a > Unicode codepoint, allowing bidirectional transcoding for > compatibility. Perhaps if Unicode had existed from the dawn of > computing, we'd have less characters; but backward compatibility is > way too important to let a narrow purity argument sway it.
I guess with that historical perspective the current situation seems almost inevitable. Thanks. And thanks to Steven D'Aprano for other relevant insights. -- To email me, substitute nowhere->runbox, invalid->com. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
