Nicolas Seriot demonstrates that Unicode's UTS #35 transliteration rules are Turing-complete, meaning they can simulate any computational process. This implies that determining whether a specific transliteration rule will terminate on a given input is an undecidable problem, highlighting a significant theoretical complexity in widely used globalization libraries like ICU.
Background
UTS #35 defines the standard for Unicode Locale Data Markup Language (LDML), which includes transliteration rules used by libraries like ICU for text conversion across languages.
- Source
- Lobsters
- Published
- Jul 8, 2026 at 09:46 PM
- Score
- 7.0 / 10