this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2025
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i think you think that telephone numbers are well-structured. they are not. they are messy. they do not fit a certain schematic.
I recommend also the following topic: "people have names". https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
Names do not in general fit into the schematic "first name, last name"
Is there not a "falsehoods programmers think about phone numbers" yet?
Edit: And once again, I'm still confused about some of these. Do we need to expand unicode for names? It's supposed to be universal. WTF is up with 40?
https://github.com/google/libphonenumber/blob/master/FALSEHOODS.md has falsehoods about phone numbers.
I suppose that a counterexample to this might be Tibetan children, who get named at puberty, IIRC. Before that, they have no names. They are just referred to as "child" or "somebody's child".
I suppose a counterexample to that might be cultures which do not use script in general. Then, obviously, there's no Unicode characters for these non-existant glyphs.
Ah, so it dovetails with the whole "children get a name reasonably fast" thing. I was interpreting that as "ever, in a natural lifespan". My bad, haha.
True, but there's little risk of a name being entered into a form without some kind of transcription.