Re: Character folding in the pretest

["Clément Pit--Claudel" <clement.pit@gmail.com>]

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On 02/04/2016 11:47 AM, Óscar Fuentes wrote:
> Clément Pit--Claudel <clement.pit@gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> On 02/04/2016 10:59 AM, Óscar Fuentes wrote:
>>> After seeing the case I mentioned (`n' matching `ñ' in Spanish
>>> text) it is obvious that the feature is not ready for prime 
>>> time.
>> 
>> This is interesting. I guess it boils down to whether you're trying
>> to avoid false positives or false negatives. For me the strength of
>> this feature is that it lets me find virtually anything using an
>> dumb keyboard (one without easy access to accents); I don't care
>> too much about false positives (that is, I don't mind if ‘n’ finds
>> ‘ñ’). In that sense, it doesn't matter if letters "are different";
>> all that matters is whether they look different. I imagine that's
>> why the Unicode standard defined things that way. It seems this
>> behavior is consistent with that of most online search engines (I
>> tried Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo; all return accented matches for
>> unaccented keywords).
> 
> I see your point, but you are talking about accents all the time. In 
> Spanish `n' and `ñ' are different letters. `n' matching `ñ' is no 
> different than `p' matching `q'. I think that you will agree that
> some of us will see that behavior as a glaring bug.

I should have said diacritics instead of accents; sorry. The difference between n matching ñ and p matching q is that graphically, ñ is n + ~ (it can also be encoded that way: ̃n). 

Here's another issue that character folding solves; Id like your thoughts on it. Try to search the text of my message for 'n' and 'ñ', without any sort of character folding.

This will match n but not ñ: ̃n.
This will match ñ but not n: ñ.

Note that the behaviour has nothing to do with Emacs; most applications will behave the same. The first ñ is using n + combining tilde, while the second is a single character ñ. Both are legal representation of the Spanish letter ñ. With character folding, both match 'n'. This is a much more logical default, I think. The same thing can be said for virtually every diacritic.

On a more personal note, I wouldn't see the character folding behaviour as a bug for French, where ç is quite different from c, and é is quite different from e.

>> I'm wary of smart solutions based on locale or buffer language.
>> It's not uncommon to be writing a single document in multiple
>> languages; especially if names are involved. Plus, it's not obvious
>> that a single set of settings is enough for each locale. For
>> example, one could argue that folding accents makes no sense in
>> French: ‘supprimé’ means ‘removed’, but ‘supprime’ means ‘removes’.
>> Yet it is not uncommon for people to write the latter for the
>> former, especially when using a dumb keyboard.
> 
> I'm not sure how to fix this, but seeing similar reservations from
> other users, some language-dependent behavior is unavoidable.

I don't think so. An on-off switch seems enough to begin with. Language-dependent folding could to be a separate feature; unicode folding (the curretn implementation) would be a fine feature to start with, I think.


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