On Tue, Jun 12, 2001 at 06:44:02PM -0400, Dan Sugalski wrote:
> While that's true, KATAKANA LETTER A and HIRAGANA LETTER A are also
> referring to distinct things. (Though arguably not as distinct as either
> with LATIN CAPITAL A) If we do one, why not the other? I'm perfectly happy
> with an answer that starts "because...", but we should have an answer.
Because anything which treats KATAKANA LETTER A and LATIN CAPITAL A
as the same thing needs to treat KATAKANA LETTER KA and the sequence
(LATIN CAPITAL K, LATIN CAPITAL A) as the same thing.
Because this as much sense as allowing WHITE SMILING FACE to match
(COLON, HYPHEN, RIGHT PARENTHESIS).
Because the logical extension of this is to allow a sequence of Kanji
or other ideographic characters to match their Romanized representation
(or vice versa), which is a reasonable approximation of impossible.
> We probably also ought to answer the question "How accommodating to
> non-latin writing systems are we going to be?" It's an uncomfortable
> question, but one that needs asking. Answering by Larry, probably, but
> definitely asking. Perl's not really language-neutral now (If you think so,
> go wave locales at Jarkko and see what happens... :) but all our biases are
> sort of implicit and un (or under) stated. I'd rather they be explicit,
> though I know that's got problems in and of itself.
A fair question, and not one I can answer. I can say that I feel that
providing a mechanism for Hiragana characters to match Katakana and
vice-versa is about as useful for a person doing Japanese text processing
as case-insensitive matching is for a person working with English.
- Damien
