It's curious that the Arabic Presentation Forms got
into Unicode at all, and a number of people still think
it was a mistake, a sell-out. One of the Fathers of Unicode
told me they were deprecated. Even the Unicode specification
explains their presence rather apologetically.
Well, one reason that often comes up with Unicode is that they want to
have a 1:1 round-tripping from any legacy encoding to Unicode and back.
So if some existing old encoding had the Arabic presentation forms,
Unicode had to have them.
--
Jarkko Hietaniemi <jhi(_at_)iki(_dot_)fi> http://www.iki.fi/jhi/ "There is this
special
biologist word we use for 'stable'. It is 'dead'." -- Jack Cohen
