So, should I hop over to the Netherlands and let you type the character or steal your MacBook Pro instead?

You're welcome to try :-) But seriously, my point was that in the future there will be more ways to enter Unicode characters. Now, how that VARIATION SELECTOR-16 got there, it looks like it is a new feature of High Sierra :-( I've recently upgraded and am 100% sure it would not add the VARIATION SELECTOR-16 before. Grrr. It even does that from the Symbols viewer. Double Grrr.

Thank you for spotting this. Wonder whether we would need to fix this in Perl 6 (so that it wouldn't matter if there is a VARIATION SELECTOR after it or not.

With regards to possible confusion, that's also possible in the ASCII world: e.g. atomic-inc-fetch($ok) versus atomic_int_fetch or atonic-inc-fetch.