U+07FA, NKO LAJANYALAN (was Re: consensus on TATWEEL)

[John C Klensin]

--On Thursday, July 16, 2009 09:22 +0100 Michael Everson
<everson at evertype.com> wrote:

> On 16 Jul 2009, at 08:27, Patrik Fältström wrote:
> 
>> On 15 jul 2009, at 00.56, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
>> 
>> I have not seen any explicit consensus that U+07FA NKO
>> LAJANYALAN   should be DISALLOWED, but maybe I am
>> misunderstanding the earlier   discussions about TATWEEL.
>> 
>> Is the consensus of the group that U+07FA NKO LAJANYALAN
>> should be   DISALLOWED as an exception?
> 
> It is 100% as meaningless as a character and as dangerous in
> an IDN   context as TATWEEL. Yes, it should be DISALLOWED.

Patrik,

To repeat what Michael, Mark, and others are saying from a
slightly different perspective, these "alignment" and
"justification" characters  (not necessarily the Unicode
terminology) are as problematic in identifiers as ASCII spaces
(one at a time or in multiples).  They have no phonetic meaning,
are not letters in any of the other usual senses, and can be
added or subtracted from strings without readers perceiving any
difference.

I thought we had settled this earlier, but it obviously fell
through the cracks.

So, yes, they should be DISALLOWED (and we should not be
spending more time on them).

   john