<i18n dev> java.lang.Character lacuna #2 of 2

[Tom Christiansen]

Sherman,

The other code thing that I saw, but also of course did not fix given 
where you are in the release cycle, was another of these mysterious 
non-parallel things.  You have a 

   String getName(int codePoint) 

function (well, static method) which takes a code point (like U+0130) and
produces a string ("LATIN CAPITAL LETTER I WITH DOT ABOVE").  But you have
no corresponding inverse function!  You have a get name from char but no
get char from name.  

Have I maybe missed something?  Is it somewhere I didn't notice?

This is important so that people stop having to put ugly magic 
numbers in their source code.  Which do you prefer, eh? :)

    int leftQ  = 0x2039; 
    int rightQ = 0x203A;

vs: 

    int leftQ  = getCharFromName("SINGLE LEFT-POINTING ANGLE QUOTATION MARK");
    int rightQ = getCharFromName("SINGLE RIGHT-POINTING ANGLE QUOTATION MARK");

See

    http://icu-project.org/apiref/icu4j/com/ibm/icu/lang/UCharacter.html#getCharFromName(java.lang.String)

which has these nifty paired, parallel functions so you can go both ways:

    static int getCharFromName(java.lang.String name) 
          Finds a Unicode code point by its most current Unicode
          name and return its code point value.
    static int getCharFromName1_0(java.lang.String name) 
          Find a Unicode character by its version 1.0 Unicode name and
          return its code point value.
    static int getCharFromNameAlias(java.lang.String name) 
          Find a Unicode character by its corrected name alias and
          return its code point value.
    static java.lang.String getName(int ch) 
          Returns the most current Unicode name of the argument code
          point, or null if the character is unassigned or outside the
          range UCharacter.MIN_VALUE and UCharacter.MAX_VALUE or does not
          have a name.
    static java.lang.String getName(java.lang.String s, java.lang.String separator) 
          Returns the names for each of the characters in a string
    static java.lang.String getNameAlias(int ch) 
          Returns the corrected name from NameAliases.txt if there is one.

Maybe this is something you might be able to consider for JDK8.  
It's not really a bug like the other things, but it sure would 
make sense to have, and be a great convenience.

Thanks a lot!

--tom