Michael Everson wrote:
>Martin J Duerst wrote:
>>Please be careful. To know whether an A is just only an A, you only have
>>to check the next position. If that next position is not a combining
>>character, you know it is an A, if it is a combining character, you
>>know it is "something else".
>
>Yes, but it's not a once-off look, is it? Because you can stack combining
>characters. So you know it's not an A, but you have to keep looking and
>looking and looking, don't you? Doesn't this make processing much more
>complex than Level 1 processing?
Level 3 is more complex than level 1, and level 1 is more complex than
ASCII. Wouln't it be nice if everyone would just use plain English?
Level 1 solves the problem for a limited set of mainly Europen languages, but
the cost is very high: constant revision of the character set standard.
A truly "universal" character set can only be built on composition.
As far as I can remember, Unicode accepted pre-composed characters as part of
the great compromise with ISO 10646. It doesn't mean we have to think of them as
anything more than a pragmatic sanction.
Jonathan
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