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Comment by nottorp | Hacker News Reader

Is Unicode turing complete now? Does anyone think it's a good idea?

Do you want to go back to codepages and needing to know the difference between CP1252 and ISO 8859-1?

No, but filenames should never have supported anything other than plain ASCII. Not only filenames but anything that has semantic meaning or is otherwise relevant to the functioning of the system.

Unicode should have been confined strictly to document content and UI presentation.

So Germans shouldn't be allowed to use "ä" in their file names?

Like the hive mind is trying to make logging in ultracomplicated for security reasons, why not dissalow confusing characters in file names for security reasons?

Oh but it would make file names less complex. We can't have that.

Edit: btw, how many ways can you express an "ă" in Unicode? How many different file names that look the same visually can you end up with?

It's only English people who find "ä" confusing. The provincialism in this thread...

You don't know about the many ways to represent an Unicode character and the 4 normal forms then. Easy to wonder why I say it's enterprise complex in that case, but it is.

No true german would ever have a hard time discerning between ä and ă. That would be like mixing up p and b for an anglophone.

:) I'm not german. My language doesn't use ä but it uses ă. Thanks for noticing. My point still stands.

Yes, and Asian languages would have to use transliterations. So what? Security over convenience.

I'm pretty sure there is a more sane solution in between. Too bad the commitees went wild instead.

Just like with ipv4 and ipv6.

Unicode still doesn't do loops, so no, but it's sightly less complex that human written language is, so it's very complex for sure.

Human language for sure was a awesome idea. We're finding out with Generative Large Language Multi-Modal Models that languages are a interesting building block for what we can call intelligence.

Unicode is a great idea and the way it was before sucked ass.

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