Unicode block for programming related symbols and codepoints?

[Alfred Zett]

Frédéric Grosshans:
> Le 09/02/2015 13:55, Alfred Zett a écrit :
>>
>>> Additionally, people tend to forget that simply because Unicode is 
>>> doing emoji out of compatibility (or other) requirements, it does 
>>> not mean that "now anything goes". I refer folks to TR51[1] 
>>> (specifically sections 1.3, 8, and Annex C).
>>>
>>> [1]: http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51
>>>
>> You know, the fact that this consortium ever took emoji into 
>> consideration immediately justifies to include everything everyone 
>> ever wanted. There is no such thing as important data including 
>> emoji. :)
> The including of emoji was a considerable debate here, with people 
> strongly against and strongly for. The trick is that they were already 
> used as digital characters by Japanese Telcos and their millions of 
> customers. They were de facto encoded as characters in Japanese text 
> messages. At the time of encoding, the spread of smartphones made them 
> appear in other places (emails, web forums, etc.)
>
The trick is that one doesn't bargain with Telcos and similar criminals.
Gotta drop them hard and the pest will go away from itself after five 
years or so.
>> Jean-Francois Colson:
>>> I need a few tens of characters for a conlang I’m developping. ☺ 
>> Except two or three control characters don't make a con language.
>> Also, if you don't like con languages in Unicode, what's this: 
>> http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F700.pdf
> I doubt that “not liking con languages” is a faithful description of 
> Jean-François ;-)
>
> On a more serious notes, this block is actually a set of “scientific” 
> (at his time) notations used by Isaac Newton in its time. They were 
> encoded in Unicode following an academic project to digitize his 
> manuscripts. So here, you have characters used 3 centuries ago by no 
> less than Isaac Newton, most of them having a much longer history, and 
> useful for science historians. See 
> http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2009/09037r2-alchemy.pdf for details.
>
That's actually interesting. Good to know, thanks.
> I think everyone her knows what you are saying, and that the notion of 
> plain text is a bit fuzzy. But if you cannot argue that your character 
> has a meaning in plaint text, for some value of “plain text”, then you 
> can not hope for an encoding in Unicode.
>
OK, in this case I agree it makes little sense to hope for such characters.

Best regards,

A. Z.