Grapheme clusters, a.k.a.real characters

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, Jul 21, 2017 at 2:46 AM, Rhodri James <rhodri at kynesim.co.uk> wrote:
> On 20/07/17 16:18, Rustom Mody wrote:
>>
>> So coming to the point:
>> Its not whether Einstein or Mencken¹ is right but rather that  Mencken
>> applies to
>> 1 whereas Einstein applies to 3
>>
>> And (IMHO) text should be squarely classed in 3 not 1
>>
>> The gmas of this world have made shopping lists, written (and taught to
>> write)
>> letters [my gpa wrote books] long before CS and before any of us existed.
>>
>> And if suddenly text has moved from being obvious to anyone to something
>> arcane
>> involving
>> - codepoints (which are abstract and platonic)
>> - (≠) glyphs
>> - (that fit into) octets (whatever that may be except they are not bytes)
>> - And all other manner of Unicode-gobbledygook
>> Something somewhere is wrong
>
>
> The something that is wrong is a failure to consider the necessary _depth_
> of knowledge.  The shallow (read: obvious and intuitive) definition of text
> works just fine in the context of grandma's shopping list or granddad's
> book, localised environments with heavily circumscribed usage patterns.  It
> breaks down in the global environments we've been talking about in much the
> same way that the obvious and intuitive definition of numbers breaks down
> when you start considering infinities, or Newtonian mechanics breaks down
> near the speed of light, or pretty much everything intuitive breaks down at
> quantum scales.

ALL of the problems in this thread can be explained to a cat.

https://xkcd.com/722/

I wouldn't ask the cat's opinion on the definition of a character, though.

ChrisA