RE: A basic question on encoding Latin characters

From: Robert Brady (robert@ents.susu.soton.ac.uk)
Date: Tue Sep 28 1999 - 19:46:56 EDT


On Tue, 28 Sep 1999, Kenneth Whistler wrote:

> Pattern matching such as that described above for Expect is another
> disguised instance of ASCII-think in computers: it depends on the
> assumption character=glyph (or more correctly, character=grapheme in
> this case), since it is expecting one user "keypress" for their
> "character"--i.e. grapheme--to correspond to one character position
> in a matching string table. This is amenable to the Latin-1, Latin-2,
> type hacks to deal with Swedish, German, French, etc., but gets
> progressively more broken as the model is extended to other writing
> systems. So the keypress-based app with precomposed letters works for
> "a-ring-above" without disturbing a match against "a". What if my
> language is Klikitat or something, and I have letters spelled
> "t modifier-letter-theta combining-comma-above" that have to be
> kept distinct from "t" and "t modifier-letter-theta"?? Is that an
> argument to keep encoding hundreds more digraphs, trigraphs, letter-accent,
> letter-double-accent, digraph-accent, combinations, etc., so that the
> broken keypress-based apps can work for (several thousand) Latin-based languages
> without change? I don't think so.

Yes, there is no adequate solution. This is rather a shame.

-- 
Robert



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