Re: byteoffset() in lutf8lib.c from 5.3, work2

[Tim Hill <drtimhill@...>]

On May 13, 2014, at 9:48 PM, Dirk Laurie <dirk.laurie@gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> It's not Unicode's fault. It's merely that real life is complicated.
> 
> When there are only 26 letters, and they are physically implemented
> on your keyboard by hitting a button that originally was a lever that lifted
> the entire platen, of course it is easy to know what is uppercase and what
> is lowercase.
> 
> The moment you leave the comfort of the (maybe accented) Latin
> alphabet, it becomes less obvious. You don't need to go far. As recently
> as 250 years ago, English itself still imitated Greek by using different
> symbols for lower-case `s`. Lower-to-upper is simple. Upper-to-lower
> is ambiguous.
> 
> Unicode is nothing less than the 21st-century rebuilding of the tower
> of Babel. In the long run, it might not be any more successful than
> that tower in symbolically unifying our species.
> 
> But while it stands, it is a magnificent structure.
> 

Perhaps, but I think it suffers from the “MS Word” disease .. trying to have every feature everyone wants and ending up with no-one liking it because it is too complicated. Handling text is a complex problem, but Unicode is a complicated solution. I’ve always admired solutions to complicated problems that are not inherently complex .. Lua being a prime example.

—Tim