Re: String name and Character Name

From: Andrew C. West (andrewcwest@alumni.princeton.edu)
Date: Fri Apr 22 2005 - 06:20:55 CST

  • Next message: Andrew C. West: "Re: String name and Character Name"

    On Fri, 22 Apr 2005 08:38:37 +0100, "Arcane Jill" wrote:
    >
    > If Joe Public were to encounter the word "BRAKCET" in an
    > application like BabelMap, for instance, they would assume this to be a bug in
    > BabelMap. And perhaps quite rightly - since why should BabelMap be regarding
    > machine-readable unique identifiers as if they were names anyway? (But it does
    > ... and it even has a "Search for character by name" feature).
    >

    In the same way that light sometimes behaves like particles and sometimes
    behaves like waves, Unicode character names sometimes behave like
    machine-readable unique identifiers and sometimes behave like meaningful names.
    In an application like BabelMap it is most useful to believe that Unicode
    character names are actually meaningful names (although believing it to be so
    does not mean that it is so).

    Andrew



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