On: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters

[the_mitsuhiko]

The difference between an icon and a letter is small and unclear. & is a symbol but was considered a letter as an example. Chinese characters are words etc.

[agumonkey → the_mitsuhiko]

Good point. Letters.. punctuation.. symbol .. the lines are blurry. If I may I'd say that & is a symbol that represent a grammar connective. Which is a generic abstraction and won't cause explosion like having symbols for every word out there.

[the_mitsuhiko → agumonkey]

> may I'd say that & is a symbol that represent a grammar connective

Then what about §? or $? Or %? The list is endless.

[agumonkey → the_mitsuhiko]

You're talking about potential concatenation or are these used (never seen them). If the former then I think it's a bit outside the problem scope.