On Feb 21, Carl Eastlund wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 21, 2009 at 11:50 AM, Eli Barzilay <[email protected]> wrote:
> > On Feb 20, Brian Harvey wrote:
> >>
> >> And, what does string-ci=? do about Turkish in R6?
> >>
> >> (And, I give up, I'm ignorant, where is Azeri spoken?)
> >
> > *sigh*
> >
> > I'm usually very indifferent for cultural arguments (especially
> > living in a place I'm not native to), but that's just being
> > amazingly rude.
>
> "Azerbaijani (also Azeri, Azari, Azeri Turkic, Azerbaijani Turkic)
> is a language belonging to the Turkic language family, spoken in
> southwestern Asia, primarily in Azerbaijan and northwestern Iran."
>
> That was from Wikipedia, which I got to via Google. I didn't know,
> so I asked the internet. I was ignorant, and I admit it, and I
> don't see what's rude at all about it.
It was rude in its insinuation that Azeri is somehow irrelevant. Does
it really matter what people are speaking the language? If it was a
naive question, I'd assume that Brian would do just what you did and
googled for it (it's even included in the search result snippets, no
need to even click your way to wikipedia).
But eventually there are some decisions that must be made that are
related to culture. For example -- Hebrew can be written in two
different style of letters, and the style difference is more than just
a change of font (one is used almost exclusive for printed texts and
the other for hand-written texts). The question of whether to include
both or only one must be a question that people raised somewhere, and
probably argued about, and some side won. In the unicode case there's
no distinction. OTOH, unicode did make some questionable characters
(whatever that ("characters") means) like "double vav", which must be
really important to some Yiddish speaking crowd -- and could be used
to create some amazingly confusing programs.
As a programmer, I really don't want to care about all of this.
Someone made some decision like that "double vav" that distinguishes
two strings that render in exactly the same way, and as a Hebrew
speaker it doesn't make any sense to me -- but as a hacker I still
don't want to care about the differences. The bits that represent the
two in a (for example) UTF-8 text file are different, so the easiest
way for me to avoid it so to just look at the bits.
In exactly the same way someone decided to have a bit to differentiate
lower and upper case ASCII letters, and as a *programmer*, I don't
want to care about the meaning of that particular bit -- it's
different, so the easiest way for be to deal with is to consider it a
different identifier.
--
((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) Eli Barzilay:
http://www.barzilay.org/ Maze is Life!
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