Re: [boost] Re: Re: Any interest in adding unicode support to boost?

From: Peter Dimov (pdimov_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-10-20 07:51:21

Vladimir Prus wrote:
> Peter Dimov wrote:
>
>> Vladimir Prus wrote:
>>> Eric Niebler wrote:
>>>> No. "Normalization" doesn't always mean canonical decomposition.
>>>> There are several canonical forms, some of which *require* the use
>>>> of composite characters. In fact, the XML standard requires such a
>>>> canonical form. A Unicode library cannot hide the issue of
>>>> canonicalization from the user, because users will care which
>>>> canonical form is being used.
>>>
>>> Why? If I want to compare two string, I don't really care which
>>> normalized form is used.
>>
>> But if you need a particular normalized form for other purposes (to
>> store it into a database, perhaps), you have no way to obtain it from
>> operator==.
>
> Yes. But it's possible to have standalone "normalization" function,
> and still use default normalized representation for the string class.

Thereby assuming that all users need to pay for normalization (twice) on 
every comparison?

Or maybe you are arguing that the string should always be kept in a 
particular normalized form?