On Tue, Jun 12, 2001 at 05:40:32PM -0700, Damien Neil wrote:
> The ability to match Hiragana as Katakana and vice-versa is almost
> identical conceptually to the ability to perform case insensitive
> matches on English text.
I am going to choose not to disagree with you on this, but...
> > What next, you want to maybe add Japanese and Chinese readings for all
> > the kanji and convert between them too? That would be *considerably*
> > more useful. :)
You seem to have failed to respond to this point; this is important,
because because the underlying question is "where should it end"? If
we're going to go the way of putting kana equivalence in core, why not
put kana-kanji equivalence in? *Much* more useful, would help searches a
great deal. And, you know, you might as well throw Romanization support
in there as well, since you never know *what* format the data might be
in, and well, there are a huge number of languages other than Japanese
we have to deal with, and before you know it, five megabytes of
perl-6.0.0.tar.gz implements an interpreter and the other three hundred
megabytes is a highly developed table-driven transliteration engine
between most of the world's languages.
Or we could keep it out of core. It's up to you, really.
Think about it, for this and other issues: "Is it the job of the core of
the Perl interpreter to do this?" For every time you answer "yes" to that
question, you make the core bigger, more complex and delay its release for
another couple of weeks. So I'm trying to say "yes" as little as possible.
(This is essentially what RFC296 was all about.)
> Katakana is frequently used to write words with additional emphasis,
> to convey the impression of a sentence being spoken with an accent,
I must admit, I've never *ever* seen this. Not saying it doesn't happen,
mind you, just that I've never seen it. Sentences in katakana are
*really* hard to read (which is why hankaku was a spectacularly Bad
Thing) and there are many easier ways of stereotyping accents. And yes,
I do a load of work on accents - accent paper in seven hours, no less.
Must be time for sleep. :)
> to write the on-youmi of a Kanji,
Hrm, no, not usually; furigana are almost always hiragana, and
learner's textbooks - bah, they're not real Japanese. :)
> to write foreign loan words, and to write onomatopoeia. (This is not a
> complete list.)
You're preaching to the choir, and possibly a couple of bishops.
--
I will not suffer fools gladly, but I will gladly make fools suffer. -Bimmler
