On Tue, Mar 27, 2007 at 06:44:42PM -0500, David Starner wrote: > On 3/27/07, Rich Felker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >This is not a simple task at all, and in fact it's a task that a > >computer should (almost) never do... > > Of course. Why shouldn't an editor go through and change 257 headings > to titlecase by hand? Humans are known for their abilities to do such > tedious > things without error, aren't they?
There was a reason I wrote "almost". This is one of the very few places where a computer should ever perform case mappings: in a powerful editor or word processor. Another I can think of is linguistic software (e.g. machine based translation, or anything that's performing semantic analysis or synthesis of human language text). These comprise a tiny minority of computing applications and certainly do not warrant punishing the rest; such functionality and special handling should be isolated to the programs that use it. > >The whole idea of case conversion in programming languages is > >digustingly euro-centric. The rest of the world doesn't have such a > >stupid thing as case... > > Really? Funny, I'm from North America, and we have a concept of case Same thing. North American civilization is all European-derived. > here. 90% of the languages native to the continent are written in a > script that has a concept of case. Is that so? I don't think so. Rather, most of the languages native to the continent have no native writing system, or use a writing system that was long ago lost/extincted. Perhaps you should look up the meaning of the word native.. :) > In fact, I think you'd find that > most of the world's languages are written in scripts that have a > concept of case. This is a very dubious assertion. Technically it depends on how you measure "most" (language count vs speaker count... also the whole dialect vs language debate), but otherwise I think it's bogus. I believe a majority of the world's population has as their native language a language that does not use case. Just take India and China and you're already almost there. Now throw in the rest of South Asia and East Asia, all of the Arabic speaking countries, .... > Furthermore, the whole reason for Unicode is because > you have to accomadate every single script's idiosyncracities; you > have to include case conversion because certain scripts demand it. No, you only have to deal with the idiosyncracies of the subset you support. A good multilingual application will have sufficient support for acceptable display and editing of most or all languages, but there's no reason it should have lots of language-specific features for each language. Why should all apps be forced to have (Euro-centric) case mappings, but not also mappings between (for example) the corresponding base-character and subjoined-character forms of Tibetan letters, or transliteration mappings between Latin and Cyrillic for East European languages? My answer (maybe others disagree) is that most apps need none of this, while editor/OS hybrids like GNU emacs probably want all of it. :) But each app is free to choose which language-specific frills it wants to include support for. I see no reason that case mappings should be given such a special place aside from the forces of linguistic imperialism. ~Rich -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
