At 1999-10-22 07:21, John Cowan wrote:
>G. Adam Stanislav scripsit:
>
>> The Unicode standard defines "character". No need for me to repeat it.
>
>Well, I will repeat it, just to show that what you think is so clear,
>is not so clear at all.
...
>Abstract character: A unit of information use for the organization,
>control, or representation of textual data. [This is the ISO 10646
>definition of "character".]
Apparently characters can even be made up of other characters. From
<http://www.unicode.org/unicode/standard/principles.html>:
# The Unicode Standard specifies the order of characters
# used to create a composite character.
For this reason, I like to say that in Slovak, 'ch' is a composite
character that's made up of two other characters.
It seems the only thing in Unicode that has a formal definition is the
codepoint. And even then you have to be careful with it when discussing
the UTF-16 surrogacy system.
-- Ashley Yakeley, Seattle WA
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