Unicode Normalization Forms: When ö ≠ ö
Reading about unicode has made me much, much more circumspect about the meaning of != in languages, and what fall-through behavior should look like. Unicode domain names lasted for a hot minute until someone registered microsoft.com with Cyrillic letters.<p>Years ago I read a rant by someone who insisted that being able to mix arbitrary languages into a single String object makes sense for linguists but for most of us we would be better off being able to a assert that a piece of text was German, or sanskrit, not a jumble of both. It&#x27;s been living rent free in my head for almost two decades and I can&#x27;t agree with it, nor can I laugh it off.<p>It might have been better if the &#x27;code pages&#x27; idea was refined instead of eliminated (that is, the string uses one or more code pages, not the process). I don&#x27;t know what the right answer is, but I know Every X is a Y almost always gets us into trouble.