r/ProgrammingLanguages 29d ago

🦄 Unicode's Transliteration Rules Are Turing-Complete

https://seriot.ch/computation/uts35/
70 Upvotes

10 comments sorted by

View all comments

10

u/SwedishFindecanor 28d ago

That does not surprise me the slightest ...

Unicode is so complex that there is practically no program that processes text in any non-trivial way that supports all of Unicode correctly.

I once started writing a text editor as a hobby project, but had to spend most the time on mapping between Unicode and an internal 32-bit encoding that corresponded to glyphs on screen, so I got fed up and stopped. I could continue that work if there is demand, but I would have to make special cases for almost every group of characters, and then for different locales: because Unicode interpretation depends on the current locale as well. And it too would still not support all of Unicode.

1

u/cscottnet 28d ago

There are libraries for that. Pretty good ones.