Re: On language-dependent defaults for character-folding

[Yuri Khan]

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 2:21 AM, Richard Stallman <address@hidden> wrote:

>   > What specific user scenario do you want to solve by folding
>   > Latin/Greek/Cyrillic confusables?
>
> If I saw an 'a' in the buffer, I'd like searching for 'a' to find it.
> Of course, I will search for a Latin 'a'.  If the char in the buffer
> is a Cyrillic 'a', I want isearch to find that too.

You don’t usually see an “а” in isolation. In normal text, you see at
least a word, and usually a sentence. Those give you enough context to
know it’s not a Latin “a”.

>   > It is when you are proof-reading text that it becomes important to
>   > distinguish Latin and Cyrillic, to check that you don’t have a stray
>   > Cyrillic letter within an English word, or vice-versa.
>
> If I want to check which kind of a it is, I can do that with C-x =.

You can do that if you already suspect one letter to be of the wrong
alphabet (e.g. your spell-checker tells you there is no such word as
“sрell-сhecker”). You cannot do that for any reasonably long stretch
of text.

> It would never occur to me to test "Is this really a Cyrillic a"
> by searching for a Latin a and seeing if that finds it.

Neither to me, though I might use a regexp isearch for [a-z] to
highlight all Latin letters in a paragraph where I expect none. It
would be confusing and misleading if it highlighted
[АВЕКМНОРСТХЬавеморстух].