From: Hans Aberg (haberg@math.su.se)
Date: Tue May 31 2005 - 18:02:06 CDT
At 21:14 +0200 2005/05/31, ëÚ•ýžËøý êý”Ëà wrote:
>... why the heck
>was ``fi'' or ``ffi'' encoded when these two can be expressed with their
>corresponding atoms, ...
One other way to view this (than backwards 
compatibility with existing character sets), is 
that the Unicode abstract character set contains 
more than one type of abstract characters. With 
modern computing techniques, the most important 
type to add is the semantic character, which 
provides proper atomic linguistic semantic units. 
The characters above, are glyphs, used to 
simplify rendering.
One can mix different types of abstract 
characters fairly freely, if one just add 
property a field, enabling one to separate them.
-- Hans Aberg
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