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Comment by adverbly | Hacker News Reader

> Just because it’s a problem you’ve never encountered doesn’t make it stupid.

That's not what I said or what I intended to imply.

I think it's stupid because It sounds like the thing that I would assume almost nobody encounters. Like so few people that this is not needed. If more than 10,000, people have ever typed this thing out for its intended purpose, I stand fully corrected.

The line has to be drawn somewhere to prevent garbage from making its way into open standards.

How many people actually use this thing? 10 loud people with power using it does not justify putting it into the open standard.

This isn't some some language that thousands of people speak. To me this seems like some weird thing that some drunk academic came up with and told his friends about.

Also, this thing is freaking huge. How many characters are this wide? Should the bar be higher to introduce obviously weird characters?

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> The line has to be drawn somewhere to prevent garbage from making its way into open standards.

Given that the term is explicitly mentioned in the Chicago Manual of Style, I suspect that this is much more of unicode trying to capture existing behavior, even if rare. And I think it's important to err on the side of capturing what people did, even if it's from an bygone era.

> How many people actually use this thing? 10 loud people with power using it does not justify putting it into the open standard.

It's definitely more than 10. But even if it's 10, I disagree with your assessment. People used this; it's worth a codepoint. There are far stranger code points out there.

And I've seen far weirder things in open standards. Have you read the C99 standard? Are you aware of the three allowed integer representations? Of which maybe two were in use in 1999, and one only in use in relic hardware that might exist in maybe tens of sites.

>I would assume almost nobody encounters

That assumption is incorrect. There are a lot of people doing academic research and of those people the vast majority of them encounter this situation a lot. This is like insisting that a strap wrench is stupid because most people don't ever need one.

That analogy is not accurate.

To make it accurate, it would be like if there was only one store you could ever buy things from and that store had a limited number of shelves, and someone came along and wanted to use up one of the shelves that to sell an old tool that few people need, and they also only accepted a weird form of payment that would randomly cause issues with some people.

I think we're getting at the heart of your misunderstanding. You seem to feel that we're running out of codepoints in Unicode (the “limited number of shelves” analogy). This could not be further from the truth. Although the number of codepoints is technically finite, it is extremely large (over a million) compared to how many we need (currently only 160,000 are defined, and for obvious reasons the rate of new additions is slowing down). The Unicode roadmaps main page[0] displays only 5 of the 17 available planes because the remaining 12 (each 65,536 codepoints large) have not yet had any characters assigned to them whatsoever.

[0] https://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/

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