Re: One more string functions change

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Sat, 28 Jun 2014 20:21:55 +0400
> From: Dmitry Antipov <dmantipov@yandex.ru>
> CC: Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> On 06/27/2014 11:46 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> > That's not enough.  Currently, Emacs down-cases using the current
> > buffer's settings.  This is TRT in some cases, but very wrong in
> > others.  It is especially wrong when down-casing strings (as opposed
> > to portions of a buffer), because there's no reason to believe that a
> > particular string being processed has any relevance to the current
> > buffer and its defaults.
> 
> What makes you think that the system locale is more relevant?

I didn't say it was.  I said that we currently have no way of telling
Emacs to down-case in a locale-specific manner:

> > IOW, we don't have any good way of specifying language- or
> > locale-specific case-folding.
> 
> What's wrong with case tables?

They are not locale- and/or language-specific.  For example,
down-casing 'I' to 'i' is wrong for Turkish.

> If we're talking about Unicode only, is it enough/possible/desirable
> to have just one (huge) case table for all supported characters?

You can't, because language-specific rules interfere.  See section
5.18 in the Unicode Standard, and the SpecialCasing.txt file in the
Unicode Character Database.

> > FWIW, I think _that_ is where we should concentrate our energy, not on
> > nano-improvements such as the one proposed here.  But hey! 90% of
> > Emacs development energy goes to such changes, while important missing
> > features are being left unimplemented for years.  So who am I to
> > complain?
> 
> "Why are you being so harsh?  We are not the enemy" (C).

Sorry about that.

> If you have a personal TOTO/wishlist/roadmap/whatever, please share.

In the department we are talking about, look at the links on this
page:

  http://www.unicode.org/reports/

UAX#14, UAX#15, UTS#10, and UTS#18 should all be supported by Emacs.
(And yes, I should complete my work on bringing the bidirectional
editing support in line with the additions to UAX#9 in Unicode 6.3.)

Elsewhere, the recent IDE and WYSIWYG editing discussions suggest
major improvements in functionality that at least some users sorely
miss.  The FFI stuff (see on-going discussions here) is yet another.

And that's just results of a 10-sec thought.