This week we chat with five members of the SG16 Unicode Study Group, Zach Laine, Tom Honermann, Steve Downey, Peter Brett and Corentin Jabot.

We talk about their efforts to get all things Unicode into the C++ standard in a tour that takes us from 5000 years ago, through the 80s and 90s up to the 2020s! We look at every known language, including a few dead ones - and some that are purely fictional.

Do you know the difference between a code unit and code point? A glyph and a grapheme cluster? String a Text? And what's wrong with Locales anyway?

This show sorts it all out.

Links:

• SG16: Unicode Direction- SG16 initial Unicode direction and guidance for C++20 and beyond
• WG21 SG16 Unicode study group- Collection of SG16 resources and links
• SG16 on cpplang Slack
• SG16 mailing list
• It's my fault you can't `throw 💩;` anymore- Steve's tweet