Re: Just curious: who is using Pike for what?

On Thu, Dec 15, 2016 at 3:42 PM, Chris Angelico <[email protected]> wrote:

> What do you mean by "strings, not text"? What are strings of if not
> text? I know the Pike 'string' type can be used to process arbitrary
> data - but then you wouldn't be uppercasing or lowercasing that data.

It's basically the difference between typesetting a book, a newspaper
article, a stamp or signage and everything else. If I wanted to print
an airline ticket, I would want to print "TOMAS RIEß" in fact, because
while I want to normalize case, I want to keep the person's correct
name.

I.e. the "ß" -> "SS" mapping pretty much only applies in text
processing contexts. Microsoft Word, scribus, LaTeX might do well to
map "ß" to "SS" in a majority of cases. In general however, mapping
"ß" to "SS" destroys information in a way that in pretty much all
cases but text processing (in the "text processor" meaning) is
completely unfavorable.