Q. P is a common character across languages. But Q is mostly unused, at least outside the romance languages who appear to spell K that way. But that can be solved by letting the characters have the same code point, and rendering it as K in most regions, and Q in France. I can't imagine any problems arising from that. :)

[–] sukhmel@programming.dev 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

If that's a joke, it's a good one. Otherwise, well, there are a lot of "this letter isn't needed let's throw it away," in most cases it will not work as good as you think.

[–] syklemil@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Yes, I am joking. We probably could do something like the old iso-646 or whatever it was that swapped letters depending on locale (or equivalent), but it's not something we want to return to.

It's also not something we're entirely free of: Even though it's mostly gone, apparently Bulgarian locales do something interesting with Cyrillic characters. cf https://tonsky.me/blog/unicode/

[–] AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net 2 points 3 months ago

Damn, thanks for that link; earlier today I was telling a non techy friend about Unicode quirks earlier and I could vaguely remember that post, but not well enough to remember how to find it. I didn't try very hard because it wasn't a big deal, so the serendipity of finding it via your comment was neat.

[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

That is quite a unique quip. I love the idea of geo-based rendering, every application that renders text needs location access to be strictly correct :D.

I'd go further with the codepoint reduction, and delete w (can use uu) instead, and delete k (hard c can take its place)

[–] syklemil@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

To unjerk, as it were, it was a thing. So on old systems they'd do stuff like represent æøå with the same code points as {|}. Curly brace languages must have looked pretty weird back then:)

[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 1 points 3 months ago

It still is a thing in some fonts: https://blog.miguelgrinberg.com/post/font-ligatures-for-your-code-editor-and-terminal

Took me a while to work out what they were called. Font rendering is hard :(

[–] mogranja@lemmy.world 1 points 3 months ago

Lol