Re: Never say never

From: John Cowan (jcowan@reutershealth.com)
Date: Tue Feb 11 2003 - 14:38:49 EST

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    Marco Cimarosti scripsit:

    > It has been repeated a lot of times that no more precomposed character will
    > never ever ever ever be added. But now I see from
    > http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U40-2100.pdf that the following new
    > character will be added in 4.0:
    >
    > - code: U+213B
    > - name: FACSIMILE SIGN
    > - compatibility decomposition: U+0046 U+0041 U+0058
    > - translation in plain English: a character to encode the word "FAX", in all
    > capitals.

    In fact, adding new compatibility decompositions is no problem, because
    compatibility characters are decomposed but never recomposed. If Q WITH
    CIRCUMFLEX were added (without putting it into the normalization exceptions
    list), it would create an incompatibility, because 3.0 normalization would
    leave Q + COMBINING CIRCUMFLEX alone, whereas 4.x normalization would
    recompose it to Q WITH CIRCUMFLEX. But no normalization will ever recompose
    F + A + X to FACSIMILE SIGN.

    It's true that a NFKx 4.0 normalization will take this character apart,
    whereas in 3.x it would have been left alone. But that is no problem:
    3.x processes are not guaranteed to do the Right Thing with respect to
    characters not yet defined! 

    -- 
One art / There is                      John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
No less / No more                       http://www.reutershealth.com
All things / To do                      http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
With sparks / Galore                     -- Douglas Hofstadter

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