Re: Unicode block for programming related symbols and codepoints?

Frédéric Grosshans <frederic dot grosshans at gmail dot com> wrote:

> The including of emoji was a considerable debate here, with people
> strongly against and strongly for. The trick is that they were already
> used as digital characters by Japanese Telcos and their millions of
> customers. They were de facto encoded as characters in Japanese text
> messages. At the time of encoding, the spread of smartphones made them
> appear in other places (emails, web forums, etc.)

Sorry, I can't let the "compatibility" argument go unchallenged again.

It can be argued — and was, repeatedly and persuasively — that the
initial collection of emoji in Unicode 6.1 [1] were added for
compatibility with Japanese telco extensions to JIS.

But the additional emoji added to Unicode 6.2 and 7.0, and planned for
8.0, do not have even this provenance; they were added on foot of novel
proposals sent directly to Unicode, or (more recently) by "popular
request." There is no longer any requirement that the robot faces and
burritos appear first in any sort of industry character set extension,
with which Unicode is then obliged to maintain compatibility.

[1] No, I am not counting the ARIB symbols or any other long-encoded
symbols that have been retroactively defined as emoji, to help
legitimize the latter.

Alfred Zett <alfred underscore z at web dot de) replied:

> The trick is that one doesn't bargain with Telcos and similar
> criminals. Gotta drop them hard and the pest will go away from itself
> after five years or so.

This does not help to make a case for or against encoding of anything.

--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, USA | http://ewellic.org
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