Re: Unicode 6.2 to Support the Turkish Lira Sign

On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 4:07 PM, Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela_at_cs.tut.fi> wrote:
> 2012-05-29 11:43, Asmus Freytag wrote:
>
>> Sovereign countries are free to decree currency symbols,
>
> Everyone and his brother can decree a currency symbol, too, or some other
> symbol.

I'm sorry but is that really a fair comparison? There are only a
limited number of nations in the world, compared to an unlimited
number of "everyone and his brother" (or "sister"!), and a national
government does mean something in the scheme of things, and so if they
want a technical standard to distinctly recognize a written form they
adopt for their currency, should the technical standard take a
political stand in *not* encoding it?!

> “Immediate availability” is an illusion, as I have pointed out. If you mean
> that the character, as a coded character, should be immediately available
> for implementors to use, then it’s a different thing. Judgment call, not a
> fact.

A judgment based on the fact that all activities relate to and depend
on money in some way, and characters related to money are hence one of
the most important in electronic text communication.

> Surely it makes sense to acknowledge that some large community is going to
> use a new symbol, even in text, and encode it in Unicode. We can just hope
> that people realize that this won’t magically make it “work.” It’s just a
> small technicality that lets implementors start using an assigned code
> point, instead of Private Use codepoints or, worse still, codepoints
> assigned to other characters. In software design, this is a minor detail,
> effectively the value of one parameter.

I think today's software makes such propagation quick. For instance,
the Indian Rupee sign officially announced on Aug 15, 2010, was
released with *ubuntu 10.10 in Nov 2010. See
http://www.kubuntu.org/news/10.10-release

> So what’s disturbing here is the apparently political move of giving one
> particular symbol a high priority in a manner that affects the whole
> process. The process of adopting new characters to Unicode may be slow, but
> I guess there are reasons behind this. It’s disproportionate to regard a
> currency symbol as an emergency case. It sets a questionable precedent.

How so?

-- 
Shriramana Sharma