I think their argument was: The characters look the same (e.g. Russian's first character and the English A) but have different meanings.
So in this example if you searched for the English word "Eat" that is also a completely legal Russian word (E, A, and T, exist in English and Russian), however it means nothing remotely similar.
I don't know if they're right or wrong. I am just saying that might be the point they were trying to make. You could make a Greco Unified unicode set and it would work fairly well, but you might wind up with some confusing edge cases where it isn't clear what language you're reading (literally).
This could be particularly problematic for automation (e.g. language detection). Since in some situations any Greco-like language could look similar to any other (in particular as the text gets shorter).
It would be impossible to do. Even back in 1991 when unicode was conceived almost all the encodings in use were ASCII-compatible.
For languages that would be affected by a greco-unification that meant the encodings that were in use before unicode had both the latin script and their "national" script.
Implementing greco-unification in unicode would mean that round-trip lossless conversion (from origin encoding to unicode back into origin encoding) would be impossible, greatly limiting unicode's adoption.
No such problem existed with han characters, in fact JIS X 0208 (the character set used for Shift-JIS) did a very similar thing to unicode's han unification.
In absence of backwards compatibility problems I would be in favor of greco-unification too.
mmastrac|11 years ago
Someone1234|11 years ago
So in this example if you searched for the English word "Eat" that is also a completely legal Russian word (E, A, and T, exist in English and Russian), however it means nothing remotely similar.
I don't know if they're right or wrong. I am just saying that might be the point they were trying to make. You could make a Greco Unified unicode set and it would work fairly well, but you might wind up with some confusing edge cases where it isn't clear what language you're reading (literally).
This could be particularly problematic for automation (e.g. language detection). Since in some situations any Greco-like language could look similar to any other (in particular as the text gets shorter).
EdiX|11 years ago
For languages that would be affected by a greco-unification that meant the encodings that were in use before unicode had both the latin script and their "national" script.
Implementing greco-unification in unicode would mean that round-trip lossless conversion (from origin encoding to unicode back into origin encoding) would be impossible, greatly limiting unicode's adoption.
No such problem existed with han characters, in fact JIS X 0208 (the character set used for Shift-JIS) did a very similar thing to unicode's han unification.
In absence of backwards compatibility problems I would be in favor of greco-unification too.