Awesome List Updates on Oct 15, 2015

6 awesome lists updated today.

1. Awesome PICO 8

Going from Lua 5.2 to PICO-8's Lua - This document is here to help folks with a proficiency in Lua understand the limitations and discrepencies between Lua and PICO-8's Lua.

Stencil Validator (code (⭐12)) - a design tool for determining if your artwork is a valid stencil

U+2E2E REVERSED QUESTION MARK - the “irony mark” to express irony/sarcasm. A useful character⸮

U+D800 to U+DFFF - surrogate code points. They are only reserved to ease UTF-16 encoding.

U+1D455 is missing. It would be an italic small “h”. It was not encoded, because it would be identical to the Planck constant ℎ (U+210E).

Diacritics and combining marks: There is a host of characters, that add to the characters before. Those are called Combining Marks. Unicode provides a handy FAQ on the details, but in a nutshell: If you add one after a character, it is placed on top of that previous one. So, a + ̊ = å. This may lead to all kinds of funny problems, because for some combinations there are pre-composed characters. Our little å here can also be encoded as U+00E5. You might note, that while this has a length of one character, the combination of a and combining ring has a length of two characters.

Of course, one can also do fun things with those characters like this answer on StackOverflow.

U+FDFA ARABIC LIGATURE SALLALLAHOU ALAYHE WASALLAM - longest decomposition form: 18 characters.

U+1680 OGHAM SPACE MARK - a space that looks like a dash. Great to bring programmers close to madness: 1 +  2 === 3.

U+037E GREEK QUESTION MARK - a look-alike to the semicolon. Also a fun way to annoy developers.

U+1F574 MAN IN BUSINESS SUIT LEVITATING - A rather curious character, that only made it into Unicode for its appearance in the Webdings font (for reasons of backwards compatibility).

U+1F596 RAISED HAND WITH PART BETWEEN MIDDLE AND RING FINGERS - the Vulcan salute. Live long and prosper! 