in reply to Re^3: tr{}{} doesn't wanna work.. what am I doing wrong?
in thread tr{}{} doesn't wanna work.. what am I doing wrong?
The original statement — that tr/// and Unicode don’t mix well — is FUD-raking nonsense. It’s baseless fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and we don’t need it.> By not supporting Unicode-aware character classes,>>> tr and Unicode don't mix well>> In what way? Seems to work fine for me.
> and listing all Unicode characters in a certain category
> is a usually a moot endeavor.> The OP is the best example: it doesn't list all accented
> characters that could be ASCIIfied.
As for character classes, since tr/// never worked on character classes before back in caveman-ASCII, it is a strawman to complain that it doesn’t work on them now.
Finally, the idea that there exists a such thing as an “accented character”, or that these can be meaningfully “ASCII-fied”, does not hold up.
More importantly, why in the world do you want to? You can’t put the djinn back in the bottle and go back to a Beaver Cleaver world of a 52-character Latin alphabet that never existed in the first place. Even Gutenberg has 230 sorts, and he was the very first printer for heaven’s sake! If we cannot do at least as well as the very first printer from half a millennium ago, what does that say about us?
I can only repeat the Bringhurst quote: The fact that such a character set was long considered adequate tells us something about the cultural narrowness of American civilization, or American technocracy, in the midst of twentieth century.
Guess what? Unlike Beaver Cleaver himself, we are no longer in the midst of the twentieth century, so why should strive to recreate that Neverland that never was?
I say that we’re better than that, and I’m proud of that fact. To see such obvious Ludditism amongst soi-disant technologists is very troubling. What sort of example are we setting for the future? /small
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