Unicode "no-op" Character?

[Doug Ewell via Unicode]

Shawn Steele wrote:

> Even more complicated is that, as pointed out by others, it's pretty
> much impossible to say "these n codepoints should be ignored and have
> no meaning" because some process would try to use codepoints 1-3 for
> some private meaning.  Another would use codepoint 1 for their own
> thing, and there'd be a conflict.

That's pretty much what happened with NUL. It was originally intended (long, long before Unicode) to be ignorable and have no meaning, but then other processes were designed that gave it specific meaning, and that was pretty much that.

While the Unix/C "end of string" convention was not the only case in which NUL was hijacked, it is certainly the best-known, and the greatest impediment to any current attempt to use it with its original meaning.

--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, US | ewellic.org