Re: "Difficult Characters" draft

[Leslie Daigle <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, 21 Apr 1997, Alain LaBont/e'/ wrote:
> A 17:58 97-05-02 +0200, Martin J. Duerst a écrit :
> [Larry] :
> >> Using UCS in identifiers that are normally "case insensitive"
> >> in ASCII, and the issues, e.g., similar upper-case forms,
> >> the role of accents and equivalence.
> 
[snip]
> However accents normally don't count much for alphabetic order, they are
> considerwed only in case of quasi-homography (cote, côte, coté, côté,
> pèche, pêche, péché).


My apologies if this has already been addressed earlier in the thread, but
this jumped out at me as being a potential point of confusion.

Namely, while accents don't count for alphabetic order in French, there
are other languages with characters which can wrongly be perceived as "accented 
characters" to people familiar with only a-z.

For example, "o" and "ö" are unrelated characters in Swedish, so it
would be erroneous to say that they are equivalent in an accent-insensitive
search.  Lexicographically, "ö" is the last character in the alphabet
in Swedish.

So, "accent-insensitive" matching is pretty well language-dependent.

Leslie.



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