Purpose of and rationale behind Go Markers U+2686 to U+2689

[Michael Everson]

On 10 Mar 2016, at 11:26, Andrew West <andrewcwest at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On 10 March 2016 at 07:00, Martin J. Dürst <duerst at it.aoyama.ac.jp> wrote:
>> 
>> because these numbers can go up to the 200s, it doesn't make sense to register them all as characters (one would need over 500!).
> 
> I don't get why that would make no sense.  We already have CIRCLED NUMBER 1 through 50, and NEGATIVE CIRCLED NUMBER 1 through 20, and these characters are widely used (in East Asian contexts, at least)
> for representing note numbers in text.  In my opinion it would be eminently sensible to extend both series up to 999, which would cover the needs of Go notation and as well as note numbering for the vast majority of users.

Good ideas don’t always get past the UTC. Remember when we wanted to encode 256 two-letter codes for the country flags? That was replaced by the “emoji flag alphabet”. Now some people want to use combinations for currency emojis, and evidently that (with some combining emoji banknote character) would have been easier with 256 atomic codes than it would be with the flag alphabet.

Michael Everson * http://www.evertype.com/