[erlang-questions] Scharfes S (WAS: Erlang 3000?)

[Julian Bäume]

Hey,

On Wednesday 19 November 2008 23:37:02 Johnny Billquist wrote:
> Can people now agree that it is not correct to just replace a ß with ss,
> and a correct capitalization of ß is not possible in Latin-1?
That's true. IIRC the consensus in a discussion I read about this topic was to 
leave ß as-is in a capitalised words. It might look a bit strange, but it 
could change the meaning completely. The best example in German is: "Maßen" 
vs. "Massen", where the first one means something like "moderate amount" and 
the second "masses", which is quite the opposite ;) 

> Just as I would say it would not be correct to replace ö with oe, even
> though ö is sorted as oe in German. (Ö is a separate letter with it's
> own correlation in Swedish, by the way.)
IMHO it is rather a work-around to use oe instead of ö in German, invented by 
some industry-people that wanted to save money when printing their books ;). 
And from a typographers point of view (I'm not one, I just came across this 
topic some time ago and read some stuff.) you are of course right, that this 
is incorrect. Since there is no easy way (just think of all that rules, that 
need to be implemented for all that different languages out there..) the 
to_upper functions should IMO all stay as they are. Programmers know about 
this problem and all that typographers can stick to \LaTeX to set their types 
in a nice and correct way.

All in all I don't think that this problem can be easily fixed by the 
programming-language and therefore shouldn't be considered here. 

bye
Julian


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