🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <ENAG.91May3200814@maud.ifi.uio.no> enag@ifi.uio.no
(Erik Naggum) writes:

>Consider the Norwegian and French words for a small restaurant,
>spelled "cafe'" (where the ' serves as a floating acute accent for
>rendering purposes in the absence of an international character set
>standard in which we wouldn't need it :-).  In Norwegian, the acute
>accent over e is optional, it's an ornament to indicate stress,
>toneme, etc.  It's not orthographically required.  In French, an e
>with acute is a different orthographic unit than plain, unadorned e.
>
>This means that in Norwegian, we can make do with a floating acute
>accent, since the function of the acute accent is to modify the
>character with which is combined.  In French, however, they cannot
>make do with a floating acute accent because the acute accent does not
>have a function by itself.  Rather, the unit is "e with acute".

I confess that I don't understand the problem.  Regardless of the
attributes of the underlying language, is there some reason why I
should care whether a character-diacritic combination is stored as
one code or two as long as (a) its image is properly rendered when
I need to look at it and (b) a program which consumes a text stream
that includes such (character-diacritic) combinations can
unambiguously determine its content?  (Of course, if I can meet
requirement "b" presumably I can meet requirement "a" as well.)

-- 
Chris Kern     ck@voa3.voa.gov     ...uunet!voa3!ck     +1 202-619-2020