Alain wrote:
>At 07:20 28/08/1996 -0700, unicode@Unicode.ORG wrote:
(that wasn't unicode@Unicode.org, but me :-).
>>Please be careful. To know whether an A is just only an A, you only have
>>to check the next position. If that next position is not a combining
>>character, you know it is an A, if it is a combining character, you
>>know it is "something else".
>
>My 2 cents... "you only have to check the next positionS", and the plural
>may be an unbounded finite number. It indeed makes softare more complex.
Alain - Please check the original mail by Michael Everson, or my mail,
where I have cited the relevant passage. To decide whether a Unicode A
is an A or something else, you indeed just have to look at the next
code. To decide whether it is an A-with-grave or an A-with-grave-and-
hook-below, for example, which is a different thing from what Michael
wrote, you have to look ahead by another position.
>In actuality Vietnamese uses up to 2 diacritics per character (so at least 4
>different codings are to be taken care of at once too for E CIRCUMFLEX WITH
>DOT BELOW TONE MARK, for example), I would say that some linguistic case
>might require up to 5 or 6... But everything is allowed, 1 million
>diacritics after A at the limit. Somebody has to decide to stop that
>look-ahead in actual applications. N is advised. In a speech that I gave at
>the 4th UNICODE Workshop in Germany in 1992 about ordering UNICODE and
>string comparison, I had set N to 3, but N should be parameterized in
>softare. But if one has the choice, he should encode fully composed
>characters as a preference, even under level 3 conformance, which is of
>course necessary to support (or to plan supporting at least), even if it is
>more complex.
The important thing is that for characters with N accents, you don't have
to look ahead by more than N+1 positions. And it is not the potential
number of accents that counts, but the actual number of accents present
in the current instance of the character.
Regards, Martin.
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