Seeking advice on casing greek final sigma

From: karl williamson (public@khwilliamson.com)
Date: Thu Nov 12 2009 - 11:32:25 CST

  • Next message: karl williamson: "Re: Seeking advice on casing greek final sigma"

    I'm thinking about upgrading the Perl 5 language to handle Unicode
    context sensitive language-independent upper casing. The only character
    in this class that is not also language dependent currently is the Greek
    final sigma.

    I'm writing to this list because it has people on it who hopefully have
    some insights that I haven't considered.

    What I'm concerned about is what to do when the last non-caseignorable
    character of the string is a Greek small sigma. The string may actually
    be part of a larger context unavailable to the code at this level.

    This can happen when the program that does this is assembling a larger
    string, of which this is a non-terminal component, or more directly,
    with the Perl regular expression syntax 's/(something)/abc\U$1\Edef/'.
    This means that 'something' is to be replaced by 'abcSOMETHINGdef'. The
    text between the \U and \E is to be upper cased. The casing function
    only sees 'something', and currently has no knowledge that there is a
    larger context; it may be hard to change that.

    I can see several possibilities:
    1) Just don't do context sensitive casing, meaning no change from
    current behavior.

    2) Do the context sensitive casing only when there is no ambiguity;
    meaning do nothing at the end of a string.

    3) Assume that the end of a string means that there is no context to
    follow, and go ahead and use the final sigma.

    So, I'm wondering if anyone here has insights, or knows what other
    languages have or haven't done with this.

    Thank you



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Nov 12 2009 - 11:36:00 CST