Re: char equivalence classes in search - why not symmetric?

[Juri Linkov]

> I'm sorry: I thought it was obvious.  For case folding, there are three
> sets of characters that might be considered a match: [a], [A], and [aA].
>  The default Emacs behavior is to make "a" mean [aA] and "A" mean [A].
> For the (relatively rare) case in which [a] is desired, one can turn
> case-fold-search off (e.g., with M-c).  Then you gain [a] and lose [aA]
> as a choice (you can't have all three from just two characters!).

Or in a brief table:

‘C-s a’     matches [aA]
‘C-s a M-c’ matches [a]
‘C-s A’     matches [A]
‘C-s A M-c’ matches [aA]

Substituting ‘A’ into ‘ä’ (other equivalent chars omitted for brevity):

‘C-s a’     matches [aä]
‘C-s a M-'’ matches [a]
‘C-s ä’     matches [ä]
‘C-s ä M-'’ matches [aä]

I see no problem implementing the same.

BTW, could this scheme be applied to whitespace matching as well?

‘C-s SPC’         matches [SPC TAB]
‘C-s SPC M-s SPC’ matches [SPC]
‘C-s TAB’         matches [TAB]
‘C-s TAB M-s SPC’ matches [SPC TAB]

> How did that upper-case letter get there?  Commands like C-w are careful
> not to add uppercase letters if there aren't already some.  So the user
> must have typed it explicitly, and so they were paying attention to case
> and have no need for a case-insensitive search.  The only harm is if
> they are inconsistent in their typing -- during something as brief as
> isearch.

Yanking a string with upper-case letters into Isearch does more harm
by converting them into lower-case.  I believe yanking a string
should not strip diacritics either.