A report from the documentation maintainer

Posted Nov 3, 2016 9:35 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: A report from the documentation maintainer by nybble41
Parent article: A report from the documentation maintainer

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.