Re: Yerushala(y)im - or Biblical Hebrew

From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Mon Jul 28 2003 - 17:38:43 EDT

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    Michael Everson asked:

    > >Because changing the canonical ordering classes (in ways not
    > >allowed by the stability policies) breaks the normalization
    > >*algorithm* and the expected test results it is tested against.
    >
    > Do you really think that algorithm with all its warts is going to be
    > used 50 years from now? I really would like to know.

    20 years, sure. 50 years is a little harder to prognosticate.

    But then people have been uppercasing ASCII for 36 years now
    with the following algorithm:

          c = c - 0x20;

    so just because an algorithm is flawed doesn't mean it won't be
    used for a long, long time.

    But in the long run, the "does it really matter in the long run?"
    kind of argument isn't very convincing. You can always answer
    that question in the negative, eventually, simply by adding
    years to the span in question.

    But Unicode normalization stability matters *now* for a large
    number of implementations with significant investments. And
    as for most decisions made about Unicode (and 10646), it is
    what matters *now* and in the foreseeable short term which
    counts the most for the decision makers. And it isn't that nobody
    has longterm vision here, but when one of your goals is
    longterm stability, you have to keep making shortterm decisions
    which individually preserve that stability.

    --Ken



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