Re: Unicode confusables considered harmful

[Stefan Monnier]

> It's been more than a hundred messages and they all talk about
> reordering characters, not Unicode confusables. Which kind of surprises
> me because disabling bidi is an easy workaround for 95% of the world
> population not knowing RTL languages.

Indeed, a package which highlights all the characters with strong RTL
directionality will do the trick for the bidi-illiterate population.
Or the bidi.c code could be easily tweaked to warn whenever it goes into
RTL direction.

It's clearly not a satisfactory solution in general, but just like ASCII
was good enough for a significant user population, this would be
sufficient for a non-trivial chunk of users.

> Any thoughts on how the uni-confusables package could be extended and
> used to detect suspicious identifiers?

And indeed, personally I'm more worried about the uni-confusables, and
about de-normalized representations of accented chars (since
I'd expect most compilers don't bother to normalize their unicode
inputs).


        Stefan