On 12/12/2003 07:34, Philippe Verdy wrote:
Peter Kirk wrote:
On 12/12/2003 04:31, Michael Everson wrote:
At 12:17 +0000 2003-12-12, Arcane Jill wrote:
And what, I find myself wondering, does "nearly infinite" mean?
It means "finite".
Except in the original context it should have meant "infinite", as there
is actually an infinite number of potential default grapheme clusters.
I really meant "nearly infinite", because even if the potential default
grapheme clusters are "infinite", the actual ones that have meaningful
semantics and effective usage are "finite" (within the finite set of code
points currently assigned in a precise Unicode version), but currently not
precisely enumerable (that's where "nearly infinite" makes sense).
OK. In fact I suspect that the number "that have meaningful semantics
and effective usage" is actually rather small and could be fitted within
the higher PUA planes if one chose to do that. After all, not many
languages use large numbers of different grapheme clusters (i.e. more
than a few hundred consonant-vowel combinations), apart from those
already encoded as CJK characters including the precomposed Korean ones.
Biblical Hebrew is probably one of the few that does because of its
accents, but the total number of distinct grapheme clusters is just a
few thousand. The problem is that a program cannot be assured in advance
that it will only be presented with grapheme clusters "that have
meaningful semantics and effective usage".
--
Peter Kirk
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] (work)
http://www.qaya.org/
