Re: Character folding in the pretest

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Óscar Fuentes <ofv@wanadoo.es>
> Date: Fri, 05 Feb 2016 22:12:34 +0100
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> > Folding has nothing to do with respecting the alphabet.  A and a are
> > not the same letters, either, and have distinct positions within the
> > English alphabet,
> 
> This is big news to me. AFAIK `A' and `a' are the same letter, one in
> uppercase form and the other in lowercase form. The English alphabet
> consists on 26 letters. This is what I learned many years ago, but it
> seems that it is all wrong.

You are missing the point.  The point is that "folding", by its very
definition, means mapping distinct things to the same value.  So no
one argues that the letters are different before they are folded.

> Seriously, if you want a feature for the people who think on terms of
> encodings, that's fine, but please keep in mind that most people see
> text as text, the same thing they can write with a pencil, not series of
> bytes on Unicode, ASCII or whatever.

The notion of "text" moved a long way since we were in kindergarten.
The Unicode Standard is about plain text, not anything else.  We
slowly adapt to that, and character folding is one milestone on that
long journey.  It has nothing to do with encoding.