Re: Matching opening and closing characters: How?

From: Joachim Durchholz (jo@durchholz.org)
Date: Fri Aug 07 2009 - 18:54:28 CDT

  • Next message: Robert Abel: "Re: Matching opening and closing characters: How?"

    Thanks for all the feedback.

    Here's my updated thinking:

    * The mention of ]...[ got me thinking. I was aiming for making all
    kinds of parentheses into the equivalent of (...), but it's important to
    allow people to define operators like |...| (say, if they are designing
    a set of operators that should mimick mathematical conventions as
    closely as possible). In other words, different pairs of parentheses
    would have different, programmer-defined semantics, which means the
    programmer names the parenthese pair anyway and I don't need to rely on
    Unicode to classify parentheses.

    * For quotes, what's the initial and what's the final quote isn't that
    important actually, they can exchange roles. It would be enough to make
    sure that the final quote is one of several valid matches to the initial
    quotes.
    For example, in German, the initial quote is a low left one and the
    final a right high one, while in English, it's a high left and a high
    right quote. So high right would pair up with both low left and high
    left - which would be fully sufficient.
    Maybe it's enough to have a fully relaxed rule: any quote character will
    do instead of ".

    * On the other hand, the usefulness of locale-specific quotes is
    dubious, so maybe it's indeed enough to stick with the traditional " and
    ' quotes from programming languages.
    On the third hand, it might be an interesting experiment to see what use
    programmer put the ability to use arbitrary quotes.

    I'll have to think about quotes a bit more, I think.

    Again, thanks for all the input.

    Regards,
    Jo

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