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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

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That's a very narrow view of the world. One example: In the past I have handled bilingual english-arabic files with switches within the same line and Arabic is written from left to right.

There are also languages that are written from to to bottom.

Unicode is not exclusively for coding, to the contrary, pretty sure it's only a small fraction of how Unicode is used.

> Somehow people didn't need invisible characters when printing books.

They didn't need computers either so "was seemingly not needed in the past" is not a good argument.

> That's a very narrow view of the world.

Yes, it is. Unicode has undergone major mission creep, thinking it is now a font language and a formatting language. Naturally, this has lead to making it a vector for malicious actors. (The direction reversing thing has been used to insert malicious text that isn't visible to the reader.)

> Unicode is not exclusively for coding

I never mentioned coding.

> They didn't need computers

Unicode is for characters, not formatting. Formatting is what HTML is for, and many other formatting standards. Neither is it for meaning.

> That's a very narrow view of the world.

But not one that would surprise anyone familiar with WalterBright's antics on this website…

At least my antics do not include insulting people.

The fact is that there were so many character sets in use before Unicode because all these things were needed or at least wanted by a lot of people. Here's a great blog post by Nikita Prokopov about it: https://tonsky.me/blog/unicode/

Sometimes you gotta say no. Trying to please every hare brained idea leads to madness.

Normalized code point sequences are another WTF feature.

Of course! I bet there are tons of ideas that didn't make it into Unicode, for better of worse. Where you draw the line is kind of arbitrary. You, personally, can of course opt out of all of that by restricting yourself to ASCII only, for example. But the rest of the world will continue to use Unicode.

> restricting yourself to ASCII only

My early compilers used code pages to work with Japanese, French and German customers. The original idea of Unicode was absolutely brilliant and I was all for it. D was an early total adopter of Unicode (C and C++ followed years later). I rejected code page support for D.

It's mission was to support all the letters in all the languages, which was a good straightforward mission. But then came fonts, formatting, layout, rendering, casing, sort ordering, normalization, combining, vote-for-my-letter-and-Ill-vote-for-yours, emoji, icons, semantic meanings, elvish, people who invent things and campaign to put them in so they'll leave a mark in history, ...

    Look Ma
    xt! N !
    e tee S
    T larip

(No Unicode needed.)

Unicode is for human beings, not machines.

How does invisible Unicode text fit into that?

It's not text, it's control characters, which have always been in character sets going back to ASCII.

ASCII having a few obsolete control characters does not justify opening the floodgates.

Over 25% of the original ASCII specification is control characters.

True. And nearly all of them are obsolete. Many were intended for control flow on an interactive terminal, which have long since passed into obsolescence. When was the last time you embedded a CTRL-C in text? The only ones that matter any more are newline and space.

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