Re: On language-dependent defaults for character-folding

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Ken.

Sorry if I'm piggy-backing on your post, a bit.

On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 02:32:44PM -0500, Ken Brown wrote:
> On 2/16/2016 9:30 AM, Per Starbäck wrote:
> > ###   Searching for "n" and finding "ñ" in Spanish, or searching for
> > "a" and finding "ä" in Swedish
> > ###   are just as strange as searching for "i" and finding "j" in English.
> >
> > It's as if many people on this list just won't believe that statement,
> > which is very frustrating.

> I've been following this discussion, and I haven't seen any indication 
> that people don't believe that statement.  What I have seen is 
> disagreement about its importance.  I've also seen several people say 
> that we should wait for more feedback from pretesters before deciding 
> what the default should be.  What's the harm in that?

What I see is a feature that, while important, is not yet ready for
prime time.  It irritates, at the very least, native speakers of Swedish
and Spanish; it is now clear it needs to be configurable for the user's
language.  It also makes clumsy and inappropriate use of regular
expressions; I think it's generally acknowledged we need to move much of
the implementation from Lisp to C.

In short, character folding as it currently is is really in an
experimental stage.  I therefore vote for it to be disabled by default.

> Ken

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).