On Wed, Sep 4, 2013 at 8:24 PM, tim Rowledge <tim at rowledge.org> wrote:
> After simplifying the scanning code a bit I'm looking into why we have the seemingly insane situation of two parallel hierarchies of CharacterScanner. So far it looks like there are no really substantive differences between CharacterScanner and MultiCharacterScanner and their subclasses. This seems like a mistake somewhere; certainly it could be mine, missing something important.

It's all my fault and incompetence.  I am sorry.

> What is the intent of MultiXXXXX ? What is CombinedChar for? Are they, honestly, still needed? Or should the older versions be removed instead? Who wrote the new classes and is that person still maintaining them? Is he/she still around here?

This kind of stuff touches the part of Squeak that *has to* work.
Once the "MultiCharacterScanner" worked and people were confident, it
was in theory possible to ditch the old implementation; but I did not
think back then that it (replacing fundamental code with a
"work-in-progress" version) was acceptable to the community.  IF there
was enough man-power, there would have been more variation of such
scanners implemented for different writing systems; keeping the
original version that works for byte strings would have been useful
under that light.

CombinedChar creates a precomposed character from a sequence of
decomposed form of Unicode when possible.  For a certain keyboard, it
was needed.

-- 
-- Yoshiki