On Tue, Jul 18, 2017 at 1:36 AM, Steve D'Aprano <steve+pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: > On Mon, 17 Jul 2017 02:10 pm, Rustom Mody wrote: >> Hint1: Ask your grandmother whether unicode's notion of character makes >> sense. > > What on earth makes you think that my grandmother is a valid judge of whether > Unicode makes sense or not? > > She made some mighty fine chicken soup, and her coffee scroll cake was to die > for, but I wouldn't want to ask her to fix my car, perform brain surgery, > solve > a differential equation, or judge the merits of a technical standard like > Unicode. > > Her English wasn't that great, her Russian was more of a country-bumpkin > dialect > than Standard Russian, and it was mixed in with a lot of Estonian and Polish > as > well, and she had *absolutely zero* knowledge of different language systems > like Chinese ideographs, Arabic, Hindi, etc. Nor did she know anything about > the legacy encodings of the 1980s and 90s. > > How could she possibly be expected to judge Unicode? She never even handled a > computer in her life, let alone program one. How could she judge the complex > balancing act between competing requirements that go into Unicode?
I think the point here is not about judging Unicode, but defining a character. If I were to ask either of my (late) grandmothers what a character is, aside from being told that I am myself quite a character, I'd probably get a reasonably sane response for text in English, Italian, or Dutch. With the possible exception that "ij" might be considered a single letter in Dutch. Except when it isn't. But neither of them is qualified to say whether и and й are the same letter or not, as both of them would think they were badly written upper-case N. Nor would I ask either of them whether 다 is one character or two. The "ask your grandmother" technique is great for questions of UI within her area of skill, but that's about it. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
