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Are there any developers with Unicode experience able to comment on this? I know the character for Reiwa has been reserved but I’m unsure if programmers are familiar with Y2K-esque bugs that could happen.
It's a combination of two existing characters, the rei as in meirei/命令 (order, command) and wa as in heiwa/平和 (peace, harmony). No new characters need to be reserved.
Anyone else gets display issues with 令? It shows up incorrectly in certain android locations (keyboard, hangouts) but looks fine in firefox. The stroke order illustration on jisho also has the last stroke wrong [1] [1] https://jisho.org/search/%E4%BB%A4%20%23kanji
This might be a problem arising because of Han unification. In Japanese, the character is commonly written with a vertical final stroke (at least in print), whereas in Chinese it's a diagonally down and to the right. However, they are encoded as the same in Unicode. What gets displayed depends on the font choice, possibly aided by somewhat hacky language hints. This particular character is the second example in the l…
Not that this is the meaning they chose, but I find it just a bit curious.
Are there any developers with Unicode experience able to comment on this? I know the character for Reiwa has been reserved but I’m unsure if programmers are familiar with Y2K-esque bugs that could happen.
The new name just uses standard characters, but what you're probably referring to is the fact that Unicode 12.1 will have a character for the two of them compressed into one glyph. Details: http://blog.unicode.org/2018/09/new-japanese-era.html Compressed glyphs like that are sometimes used on paperwork and whatnot, but everyday usage just uses the standard characters.
Amusingly there's a pun here on "Zero-sum Era". This because "rei" is a common way to read the numeral zero, and "zero-wa" (using the same "wa" from the new era name) is the Japanese term for "zero-sum".
Discussed yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19528287 I think we can treat the actual name as significant new information ( https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme... ).
This is weird. I thought this was an April Fool's joke. 冷戦 means cold war, so 令和 would mean cold peace. Not that this has an actual meaning but if we assign one it's not very positive, i.e. things will appear unpeaceful and there will be wars, but actually this is peace, in the background. Not that this is the meaning they chose, but I find it just a bit curious.
Reiwa is a newly conjured “word” that means roughly “declaration/ordinance of peace”
This is weird. I thought this was an April Fool's joke. 冷戦 means cold war, so 令和 would mean cold peace. Not that this has an actual meaning but if we assign one it's not very positive, i.e. things will appear unpeaceful and there will be wars, but actually this is peace, in the background. Not that this is the meaning they chose, but I find it just a bit curious.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because this stuff is hardcoded into the standard library (at least in Java I know it is) and I assume it's the same for other things. For example any dates in the future like 2020 will show up wrong. Where it ought to be reiwa 2 it will be Heisei 31 which doesn't even exist. Heaven forbid you were doing something crazy like matching on strings for the date etc you could get into a world of hurt. Mostly though you al…
Heisei 31 is this year. Heisei 32 and above are the ones that don't exist.
This is stupid. Make no mistake: this is not the Japanese "culture". Most private organizations in Japan have already switched to the Western calendar, and its only user is the Japanese government (although it's one of the biggest ones, sadly). They should stop wasting their time and energy for this farce. And yes, one could argue that this will create extra IT jobs that would be unnecessary if they abandoned the sys…
You could say that about a lot of things in a lot of countries. You have to think twice before you throw away such an old tradition that connects people to the past and the history of their culture.
Most Japanese people I know are either ambivalent or happy about it. No one is suggesting doing away with it.
You do know that plenty of other cultures around the world have their own calendars and these (like Japan's) coexist just fine with the Western calendar, right?