Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow

ionathan.ch

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 312 posts

Re: U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow

#11

Post by bryanrasmussen »

bamboozled wrote: post #7

These unicode characters feel like they were given to us from an alien species or something. How did it we end up with so many characters of unknown origin? I had no idea what it meant or was used for, thus assigned it a “descriptive name” when collating the symbols for the STIX project. (I still have no idea, nor can supply an example of the symbol in use.) […] it is the case that ISO 9573-13 existed long before eit…

>These unicode characters feel like they were given to us from an alien species or something.

I worked at a large media company that had lots of differing icon sets in play across different media.

These icons were in SVG and they had been optimized pretty intensely. In some cases due to a bug in one of the optimizing tools some types of bezier curves got weird, so instead of say the round headed person with their hand held up to say stop it was the star headed monstrosity pointing to doom from the heavens. Because of how the icons were used and not used these optimized errors were actually sitting around so long that nobody had examples of the original icons although one could guess because in some cases we had similar ones in other projects that had not been optimized.

So maybe a similar thing would be the source of these weird alien entities.

Re: U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow

#12

Post by Jarmsy »

cheschire wrote: post #10

The name itself sounds like it should be a graph of a downward trend line on a graph. I’m guessing the person who implemented it got this exact requirement wording in the Unicode definition and nothing else, didn’t make the logical connection, and just implemented it as close to literally as they could.

There's already U+1F4C9 for that though.

Re: U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow

#14

Post by slowmotiony »

I remember back in the day we used to find publicly exposed Windows FTP servers, create new folders using some messed up unicode characters and upload pirated games and movies there to share with each other. The only way to open those directories was to specifically type the exact path in unicode, simply double clicking on the folder in filezilla or windows explorer resulted in a error. Sometimes the admins themselves couldn't delete them and just left them there. Good times.

Re: U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow

#15

Post by rich_sasha »

Might we run out of Unicode code points, like we (seem to) be running out of IPv4 addresses?

As another comment mentions, once you add all these snowmen, with/without snow, male female and gender-neutral, in a few skin colour options (plus neutral)... it adds up. Plus, exponential growth once you consider family of snowmen (different number/genders/races of "parents", different number/gender/races of "children" and so on...).

Re: U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow

#16

Post by donkeyd »

cheschire wrote: post #10

The name itself sounds like it should be a graph of a downward trend line on a graph. I’m guessing the person who implemented it got this exact requirement wording in the Unicode definition and nothing else, didn’t make the logical connection, and just implemented it as close to literally as they could.

The update under the article has an explanation of where the name probably came from:

> I had no idea what it meant or was used for, thus assigned it a “descriptive name” when collating the symbols for the STIX project.

If I understand this correctly in the context, this person named the glyph based on what it looked like. So it wasn't the other way around.

Re: U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow

#17

Post by lifthrasiir »

jason0597 wrote: post #5

I still don't understand why Unicode has all these obscure symbols but they still haven't added all superscript/subscript numbers and letters https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6638471/why-does-the-uni... To quote a reply from the above StackOverflow thread: "So, they added a snowman with snow AND a snowman without snow , so that the weather forecaster of this world can avoid the dull snowflake , but we will never g…

Unicode superscript and subscript is not intended for mathematical usages [1].

[1] https://unicode.org/faq/ligature_digraph.html#Pf8

Re: U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow

#18

Post by scbrg »

Jarmsy wrote: post #12
cheschire wrote: post #10

The name itself sounds like it should be a graph of a downward trend line on a graph. I’m guessing the person who implemented it got this exact requirement wording in the Unicode definition and nothing else, didn’t make the logical connection, and just implemented it as close to literally as they could.

There's already U+1F4C9 for that though.

If by "already" you mean "eight years later" :)

⍼ (U+237C) is in Unicode 3.2 (from 2002), (U+1F4C9) is from Unicode 6.0 (from 2010).

[edit]: HN ate my 1F4C9 glyph. Use your imagination :)

Re: U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow

#19

Post by lifthrasiir »

rich_sasha wrote: post #15

Might we run out of Unicode code points, like we (seem to) be running out of IPv4 addresses? As another comment mentions, once you add all these snowmen, with/without snow, male female and gender-neutral, in a few skin colour options (plus neutral)... it adds up. Plus, exponential growth once you consider family of snowmen (different number/genders/races of "parents", different number/gender/races of "children" and s…

There is no reason to believe the current rate (about ~35,000 over the period 2010--2020) to change rapidly, so we are probably safe for this century. You should be aware that emoji gender and skin color is encoded in character sequences and modifiers rather than atomic characters, exactly in order to avoid that exponential growth.

And in the unlikely case that Unicode gets so many characters somehow, you can always extend it: http://ucsx.org/

Re: U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow

#20

Post by cygx »

blacklion wrote: post #9
jason0597 wrote: post #5

I still don't understand why Unicode has all these obscure symbols but they still haven't added all superscript/subscript numbers and letters https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6638471/why-does-the-uni... To quote a reply from the above StackOverflow thread: "So, they added a snowman with snow AND a snowman without snow , so that the weather forecaster of this world can avoid the dull snowflake , but we will never g…

I don't understand, why Unicode must (should?) contain superscript and subscript glyphes at all. Declared goal of Unicode is to have encoding of all characters used by all languages, past and modern. Subscript and superscript are not used by any language as separate characters, it is typesetting property. It should be solved by other means, not by character/glyph encoding. Should Unicode include ALL characters strike…

Should Unicode contain sub/superscript variants of Hangul or Devanagari or letters from hundreds other non-latin-alphabae languages?

Nope, you'd use markers similar to U+200E (LEFT-TO-RIGHT MARK) and U+200F (RIGHT-TO-LEFT MARK) that already exist to indicate text direction (which is also a typesetting property).

Post reply on HN