ietf-nntp [a-z] in Wildmats

[Charles Lindsey]

In <yl4rt8h0y1.fsf at windlord.stanford.edu> Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:

>The difference between grapheme and glyph is that a glyph is a single
>visual unit of a script, whereas a grapheme is a single logical unit; for
>example, until recently, "ch" and "ll" were graphemes in Spanish even
>though both were composed of two glyphs.  (Or at least that's my
>understanding of it.)

Ugh! Too many terms! I think "glyph" is the concept we need for the object
the user thought he had written (or caused to appear on his screen or on
his printout). So even if he is Spanish, he is well aware he had to take
two distinct actions to make "ch" appear. But he might be more surprised
to learn that one or both of them was regarded by the software a made up
of multiple characters (well, not in the case of "c" or "h", but in more
complex cases).

So in the case of [...], the user might naively expect it to be made up of
glyphs, whereas in practice if has to be made up of characters (too hard
to implement it otherwise). Which is why I suggest omitting the feature
(unless someone can persuade me that filename globbing in Unix systems
already does it sensibly).

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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