• Codex@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I love how many people brought up the Turkish “I” as if everyone here is on the Unicode steering committee or just got jobs for Turkish facebook.

    I, an English speaker, have personally solved the problem by not having a Turkish I in the name of my Downloads directory, or any other directory that I need to cd into on my computer. I’m going to imagine the Turks solve it by painstakingly typing the correct I, or limiting their use of uppercase I’s in general.

    In fact, researching the actual issue for more than 1 second seemingly shows that Unicode basically created this problem themselves because the two I’s are just seperate letters in Turkic languages. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dotted_and_dotless_I_in_computing

    If you nerds think this is bad try doing Powershell for any amount of time. It is entirely case-insensitive.

    • yum13241@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Why the FUCK did they make characters that look the same have different codepointers in UNICODE? They should’ve done what they did in CJK and make duplicates have the same codepointer.

      Unicode needs a redo.

      • Trantarius@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        Well letters don’t really have a single canonical shape. There are many acceptable ways of rendering each. While two letters might usually look the same, it is very possible that some shape could be acceptable for one but not the other. So, it makes sense to distinguish between them in binary representation. That allows the interpreting software to determine if it cares about the difference or not.

        Also, the Unicode code tables do mention which characters look (nearly) identical, so it’s definitely possible to make a program interpret something like a Greek question mark the same as a semicolon. I guess it’s just that no one has bothered, since it’s such a rare edge case.

          • mrpants@midwest.social
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            1 year ago

            In cases where something looks stupid but your knowledge on it is almost zero it’s entirely possible that it’s not.

            The people that maintain Unicode have put a lot of thought and effort into this. Might be helpful to research why rather than assuming you have a better way despite little knowledge of the subject.

            • yum13241@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              When it’s A FUCKING SECURITY issue, I know damn well what I’m talking about.

                  • mrpants@midwest.social
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                    1 year ago

                    You know the problem but not the set of reasonable or practical solutions.

                    Anyways I and l look identical too in many fonts. Should we make them the same letter?

              • kattfisk@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                1 year ago

                I and l also look identical in many fonts. So you already have this problem in ascii. (To say nothing of all the non-printing characters!)

                If your security relies on a person being able to tell the difference between two characters controlled by an attacker your security is bad.

                • yum13241@lemm.ee
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                  1 year ago

                  The problem is when you can register “apple.com” with the Cryillic A, fooling many.

                  The I l issue is caused by fonts, not by ASCII.