Re: char-class rules & please show examples of int. locales that use diff. char-class rules

[Chet Ramey]

On 6/15/17 3:04 PM, L A Walsh wrote:

> Two problems with locale-based rules are:
> 
>    1) they differ based on local convention, potentially,
> even down to what "side of the street" you live on, and

That's precisely what makes them valuable to users.

>    2) they don't account or allow for "data" (textual) outside
> of a given locale.  For companies connected by an internet with
> international customers, having a non-uniform standard is a
> serious problem at best, and unworkable in practice.

We're not talking about `data' here. We're talking about characters that
can appear in shell identifier names. Don't try to muddy the issue.


>> A character that is classified as an alphanumeric in a particular locale,
>> but not in another, can lead to portability problems. That's what we're
>> debating here, not how something gets displayed in a text editor.
>>   
> That's already a problem in that I try to use a letter from
> the Greek alphabet, in a var name, and it doesn't work.  The
> current code doesn't recognize letters outside some limited
> POSIX-defined range.  That's very constraining. 

Please. The entire scope of this discussion is how to lift that
constraint.

> 
> 
>>> How is having UTF-8 for files and text not showing
>>> respect?  
>> Look at the the issue with different locales classifying
>> characters as alphanumerics differently, and how that would impact
>> variable names incorporating locale-specific characters in `portable'
>> scripts.
>>   
> ---
>     Can you give an example?  AFAIK, most locals that allow
> international letters are already using the unicode definitions.  I
> don't know of any locale that supports internationalized characters
> that don't use the unicode rules.
> 
>     Do you have an example of different internationalized locales
> that use different character-class rules, cuz I don't know of any.

I said I didn't, since I'm not multi-lingual, but could imagine a scenario
where an "alphabetic" in, say, cyrillic is not an alphabetic in en_US.
That's a portability problem.

-- 
``The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.'' - Chaucer
                 ``Ars longa, vita brevis'' - Hippocrates
Chet Ramey, UTech, CWRU    chet@case.edu    http://cnswww.cns.cwru.edu/~chet/