>Reversing a string is a useless operation in the real world
I'm not sure why you focused on this one example, which was just meant to indicate the nature of the issue, not cite a broad concrete problem. There are plenty of situations where you'd want to operate on graphemes, not code points, like deleting the previous grapheme in a text editor. It would certainly help programmers write correct code if the two were the same.
>doing away with combining marks and encoding everything as precomposed would be impossible because you cannot have a definitive list of every single combination of letters and diacritics that may mean something to someone
It seems to me it would be trivial to enumerate these combinations, and assign code points to them. For example, the Germanic umlaut is only used with vowels, so that's at most 5 code points.
I'm not sure why you focused on this one example, which was just meant to indicate the nature of the issue, not cite a broad concrete problem. There are plenty of situations where you'd want to operate on graphemes, not code points, like deleting the previous grapheme in a text editor. It would certainly help programmers write correct code if the two were the same.
>doing away with combining marks and encoding everything as precomposed would be impossible because you cannot have a definitive list of every single combination of letters and diacritics that may mean something to someone
It seems to me it would be trivial to enumerate these combinations, and assign code points to them. For example, the Germanic umlaut is only used with vowels, so that's at most 5 code points.