In a Pickle
Cucumber, they note, “could also be used to represent a pickle”; El Reg will refrain from expanding on that suggestion to any greater degree.
No, but you went there, didn't you? Yes, you did.
8€
Want a bacon, avocado and cucumber salad? Next year, you'll be able to order it with emoji. In among the po-faced work of setting standards, the Unicode Consortium is considering adding those three emoji to the character set – along with pregnancy, crossed fingers, a nauseated face, a clown and a cowboy, and a bunch of others …
I thought Unicode was about characters, not glyphs.
An "f" (MUSICAL SYMBOL FORTE) does look a lot like an "f" (LATIN SMALL LETTER f WITH HOOK) and both have more than a passing resemblance to the "f" (LATIN SMALL LETTER f), but they are all unique CHARACTERS even though the GLYPHS for these may be indistinguishable from each other, depending on font, styling etc.
But now the wonks themselves say go ahead and use a cucumber when you mean pickle ?
Is Unicode finally running out of code points that they need to start desperately pursuing re-use over clarity of expression ? What is the world come to ?
An "f" (MUSICAL SYMBOL FORTE) does look a lot like an "f" (LATIN SMALL LETTER f WITH HOOK) and both have more than a passing resemblance to the "f" (LATIN SMALL LETTER f), but they are all unique CHARACTERS even though the GLYPHS for these may be indistinguishable from each other, depending on font, styling etc.
Not to mention that there is a separate code point for "å" (a-ring) and the symbol for the ångström unit, although these are really the same character originally. All of which makes Unicode the Phishermans Friend. Ironically, originally Unicode tried to cram all the code points to 16 bits by "unifying" Asian letters that look the same. It is incomprehensible that "å" the letter and "å" the unit name, and many similar cases were not unified.
> Is Unicode finally running out of code points that they need to start desperately pursuing re-use over clarity of expression?
Maybe just saving space for useful things...
Considering the development from :-) to these emoji things, they will be superseded again in a few years by something else, probably animated and making sounds or whatever -- and hopefully falling out of the Unicode domain.
And considering clarity of expression, if Apple shows ‚envelope with downwards arrow above‘ as ‚envelope with rightwards arrow at left‘, it does not get much clearer than that, does it?
...and of course they work really well when the sender has a different set installed compared to the recipient (or not installed at all). Or a different program which interprets the codes differently. Or some hipster downloads the latest "new" set and gets a virus from the "free" download.