[tz] Big tech warns of 'Japan's millennium bug' ahead of Akihito's abdication

[Tim Parenti]

On 27 July 2018 at 16:29, Clive D.W. Feather <clive at davros.org> wrote:

> Steve Summit said:
> > Fascinating.  From the article:
> >
> > | Unicode [can't] set the standard for that new character [...] until
> > | it knows what it's called, and it won't know that until late February
> > | at best.  Unfortunately, version 12 of Unicode is due to come out
> > | in early March...
>
> Why can't they reserve and publish a code point for the character, even
> though they don't yet know its name or appearance? They know it's coming.


Oh, the codepoint *is* reserved: U+32FF. That's the easy part.
Unfortunately, the rest is not so simple. As Ken Whistler's recent message
to the organization
<https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2018/18220-u121planning.txt>, quoted and
linked in the article, states:

The characters encoded for these calendrical symbols in Unicode have
compatibility decompositions, and those decompositions depend on the actual
name chosen for the era. Because the decomposition, once assigned, is
immutable, involving Unicode normalization, the UTC cannot afford to make
any mistakes here, nor can it just *guess* and release the code point early.

--
Tim Parenti
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