On Sat, Jan 18, 2025 at 16:42:59 -0500, Lawrence Velázquez wrote: > It is true that the man page and texinfo manual do not define > "character". (It does not mean "abstraction"; I'm not sure how you > arrived at that conclusion).
That was my word. If you have a better one, I'd love to hear it. In context: <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-bash/2025-01/msg00078.html> > "First character in the expanded value," means something like "the group of > bytes that prints at place zero as counted from the beginning of the entire > byte string..." which is the result of the expansion of 'parameter.' Since 1990 or so, "character" has stopped meaning "byte". (That used to be how things were defined in C in 1988 and earlier.) Now, a "character" is an abstraction. It refers to a single value from any kind of human writing system. In English, characters include letters, numerals, punctuation marks, and so on.
