Grapheme clusters, a.k.a.real characters

[Rhodri James]

On 18/07/17 15:10, Rustom Mody wrote:
> On Monday, July 17, 2017 at 10:14:00 PM UTC+5:30, Rhodri James wrote:
>> On 17/07/17 05:10, Rustom Mody wrote:
>>> Hint1: Ask your grandmother whether unicode's notion of character makes sense.
>>> Ask 10 gmas from 10 language-L's
>>> Hint2: When in doubt gma usually is right
>>
>> "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and
>> wrong." (H.L. Mencken).
> 
> Great men galore with great quotes galore²
[snip]
>> Unfortunately grandmothers outside their areas of expertise are particularly prone to finding those answers.
> 
> Gma for the purposes of this discussion can be defined:
> 
> - A (not necessarily) elderly person who
> - Is fairly intelligent
> - Not necessarily highly educated
> - Generally interested in life and people
> - [But not usually] in technical arcana

That last one is the killer.  Using clear and simple terminology is 
usually adequate when you aren't discussing technical arcana. 
Unfortunately we are discussing technical arcana, and that's when you 
trip over the fact that your clear, simple terminology is wrong.  It's 
an instance of Weizenbaum's joke that you quoted, just replacing 
streetlights with grandmas.

(For the record, one of my grandmothers would have been baffled by this 
conversation, and the other one would have had definite opinions on 
whether accents were distinct characters or not, followed by a 
digression into whether "ŵ" and "ŷ" should be suppressed vigorously :-)

-- 
Rhodri James *-* Kynesim Ltd