A report from the documentation maintainer

Posted Nov 2, 2016 22:54 UTC (Wed) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106)
In reply to: A report from the documentation maintainer by farnz
Parent article: A report from the documentation maintainer

> It's not too much to ask, but it's a hard problem.

As an addendum to my previous comment, the examples given here support the argument that *case-insensitive* comparison presents difficulties above and beyond case-sensitive comparison of Unicode strings. This would make traditional case-sensitive glob matching and sorting easier to implement than the current case-insensitive behavior. "Should ß == SS?" No, the first is lowercase and the second is uppercase. (Of course, you still have to deal with the question of whether ß == ss.)

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A report from the documentation maintainer

Posted Nov 3, 2016 9:35 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

The other trouble is that any human-friendly comparison function presents difficulties for the machine - too much of what's "correct" depends on your cultural norms. For example, I've known native Arabic speakers who simply could not get their heads around the idea that English has 5 different short vowel sounds, and that the difference between "nit" and "net" is significant (because the short vowel modifies the preceding consonant) - to their eyes, both were reasonable ways to write what in Arabic would be nt (as Arabic writing does not include short vowel sounds by default).

The brains of the squishy bag of meat in control of the computer are weird places - while I don't think the difficulty is insurmountable, I don't think it's a trivial problem to solve, either.