Michael Kaplan

There are swastikas facing both directions as religious symbols, but not angled Hakenkreuz like the Nazis tended to use. There also isn't a fasces or anything like that, although I feel like that's a less widely recognized symbol (and of course it is used in non-fascist contexts as well).

Probably the most interesting political symbol in Unicode is the Emblem of Iran: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emblem_of_Iran

It's referred to officially as "FARSI SYMBOL", which apparently was a euphemism chosen because during ISO standardization of Unicode the original name "SYMBOL OF IRAN" was deemed unacceptable. As a logo, it wouldn't make it into the standard today, but nobody knows how it originally got in there:

http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2005/01/29/363208.html

Yes, that was it, thanks! It's at http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2006/07/14/665714.html (Can the CP_ACP be UTF-8?) which links to http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2005/02/06/368081.html (Can a codepage be changed? How about which codepage a locale points to?) and http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2006/07/04/656051.html (Behind Norman's 'Who needs Unicode?' post).

"It is not possible given both the current architecture (which must work in both user and kernel mode) and also the inherent assumption in several subsystems (like USER) that the ACPs maximum number of bytes per character is 2."

And the #define would have been MB_LEN_MAX.

There is a more-or-less comprehensive archive[1] up to 2019 (which should probably be scraped and hoarded). The article in question is there, comments included[2].

Side note: Michael Kaplan’s blog, which Microsoft took down in a remarkably shameful manner, has also been archived[3], while Eric Lippert reposted (most of?) his old articles on his personal WordPress instance[4].

[1] http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/index.htm

[2] http://bytepointer.com/resources/old_new_thing/20110921_226_why_do_windows_functions_all_begin_with_a_pointless_mov_edi_edi_instruction.htm

[3] http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/

[4] https://ericlippert.com/

Raymond Chen's Old New Thing covered a similar issue, contrasting NTFS vs. Windows Explorer:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050617-10/?p=35293

He referenced Michael Kaplan's MSDN blog about how Windows Explorer sorts, which took me a while to find:

http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2006/09/30/778345.html

And there is a KB article about differences between Windows versions:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/319827/the-sort-order-for-files-and-folders-whose-names-contain-numerals-is-d

The function is available for use, StrCmpLogicalW:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb759947.aspx

On Windows the path separator is U+005c, it's only a backslash in most codepages, but not all: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20051014-20/?p=33753 which links to a dead link; copy here http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2005/09/17/469941.html

That doesn't change just because Unicode renders individual codepages obsolete, it's now special-cased into Windows that Japanese and Korean situations display U+005c as a currency symbol instead of a backslash.

There's also [System.IO.Path]::AltDirectorySeparatorChar which is `/` because Windows is often fine with / as a path separator as well.

A quick search brought me to [1] which says:

<quote>

As noted by Roozbeh Pournader:

Neither Farsi, nor a symbol. In real life, it is the official emblem of the goverment of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Technically that would make it a logo and thus not a suitable candidate for encoding. But Roozbeh also noted:

Exactly. The funny fact is that it has been in Unicode since 1.0...

</quote>

How reliable this is I don't know, but it sounds plausible.

[1] http://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/2005/01/29/363208.html