Re: Questions about isearch

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > > In Danish I would not consider this a ligature, but a separate letter.  It
  > > can be written as ae, however.

  > Hm... could this happen other than when transcribing a Danish name
  > containing "æ" to an alphabet without Danish letters...?

  > > Thus, it would probably be nice to match it via ’ae’.

  > Speaking for the Norwegians: probably not!

  > > But where to stop?  How about ’å’ (matched by ’a’)?

  > Absolutely not!

  > > Should it be captured by "aa"?

  > Actually perhaps yes, but only for names, and only if the locale is
  > Norwegian (and presumably also Danish).

  > Actually, considering the limitations, probably not.

It seems that perhaps we need these correspondences to depend
on the language in use.

That's true for case conversion as well.  For instance the way
to upcase 'i' is 'I' in most languages, but in Turkish it's a
character I can't find a way to enter in Emacs.

It seems to me that we want to introduce a concept of current language
which would control these things, and also the language for spell checking,
and maybe some other things.

In some cases, the current language is determined by which characters
appear.  That would work fine for scripts that are used for just one
language.  It would be hard to do that for Latin scripts, though.
For latin scripts one might always have to specify it explicitly,
but it could be specified by a file local variable or other such
per-file customization mechanism.

The language environment, which already exists, is something
different.  It controls how to recognize character codings, and
therefore has to be global.  The current language should be per-buffer
and perhaps should vary between parts of a buffer.  So they can't
be the same thing.


-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation (gnu.org, fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (internethalloffame.org)
Skype: No way! See stallman.org/skype.html.