Re: Character folding in the pretest

[Clément Pit--Claudel]

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'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.

Clément.

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