"A Programmer's Introduction to Unicode"

[William_J_G Overington]

Prof. Janusz S. Bień wrote:

> Just yet another reason for introducing the notion of textel?

I opine that it would be a good idea to introduce several new words, of which textel would be one, with each such new word having a precisely-defined meaning so that in precise discussions of programming techniques people could discuss the situation without needing to use any of the words character, code point, grapheme cluster.

How many such new words would be needed?

I remember how in electronics the introduction of the term Hertz to be used instead of cycles per second helped discussions.

After the introduction of the term Hertz it became easy to refer to twenty cycles of a fifty Hertz signal without confusion over one's meaning.

So introducing several new precisely-defined words now could help lots of discussions in the future.

Perhaps, apart from textel, the definitions could be produced first and then people can decide, for each such definition, which new word would be a good word to have that definition.

The recent introduction into Unicode of ZWJ sequences for some emoji and the introduction into Unicode of tag sequences applied to a base character does could mean that the introducing of such new words becomes of increasing importance due to the programming implications of those recently introduced techniques. 

William Overington

Monday 13 March 2017