Re: Choice of fonts displaying etc/HELLO

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>> > I meant would it break something if "\\cj" matched only the Katakana
>> > and Hiragana characters instead of what it matches today?
>> 
>> I don't know what it would break, but that doesn't seem like
>> particularly intuitive behavior.
>
> ??? Why not?

Because Japanese as a language uses more than just Katakana and
Hiragana.  You are (apparently) suggesting that \\cj match only
characters that are _uniquely_ japanese, and while that might be an
interesting predicate in some cases, it doesn't seem particularly useful
in general (well to me anyway).

If there's any use at _all_ for the \\c feature, then it should match
how japanese is actually written, rather than "a random subset which
happens to be trivial to implement from the set of data we have
available today".

>> I think emacs' concept of characters belonging to multiple language
>> categories is pretty neat actually.
>
> Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how the fact that, say,
> Cyrillic characters are claimed to belong to Japanese category could
> be considered ``neat''.

I didn't say that all the particular results of that functionality were
good -- cyrillic as japanese is one example of where it's silly.

However the _ability_ to have characters belong to multiple categories
is a good thing, and I think it fits the natural way people think of
them.

-Miles

-- 
Idiot, n. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human
affairs has always been dominant and controlling.