alt Hacker NewsWhich makes sense, because human language is apparently Turing complete, so anything intended to represent it faithfully would wind up with that characteristic, too.
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anonymous908213 • today at 7:08 PM
Bitmap fonts aren't turing complete. The fact that TrueType is built with an arbitrary virtual machine is insane, makes implementations ridiculously complex, and is a huge security liability. The purpose of the VM wasn't to "represent human language faithfully" but to make fonts look a little better when displayed at a variety of resolutions, via hinting. Hinting doesn't necessarily require a full VM, but somebody let the engineers have a little too much fun.
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Human language isn’t a formal language, so this is a category error.
In the present context, an example is that the common reading of a Kanji word isn’t always well-defined, and neither is the decomposition of a sequence of Kanji characters into words.