character.theory.txt

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   CHARACTER  
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REPRESENTATION ==>                #Binary representation is character encoding
                                  #A code unit is the charset binary unit, e.g. 7 bits with ASCII, 1 byte with UTF-8, 2 bytes with UTF-16

DIFFERENCES ==>                   #Character:
                                  #  - character meaning unit, e.g. punctuation, diacritics, letter, ideogram
                                  #  - correspond to a Unicode codepoint
                                  #Grapheme:
                                  #  - character + its combining characters
                                  #Glyph:
                                  #  - visual unit, i.e. visual representation of a grapheme.
                                  #  - some graphemes do not have any.
                                  #  - some graphemes share same glyph
                                  #  - some graphemes have similar looking glyphs ("homoglyph")
                                  #Phoneme:
                                  #  - sound unit, i.e. single sound
                                  #Syllable:
                                  #  - rhythm unit, i.e. several sounds pronounced as one
                                  #Morpheme:
                                  #  - meaning unit, e.g. prefixes (e.g. "un"), suffixes (e.g. "s"), roots ("believe")
                                  #  - lexical morpheme: has a meaning on its own, e.g. noun, verb, adjective
                                  #  - grammatical morpheme: must be associated with another morpheme, e.g. preposition, articles, conjunctions
                                  #Lexeme:
                                  #  - word beyond different forms (conjugaison, plural, etc.)
                                  #  - lemma: canonical form of a lexeme, usually with least marks/form
                                  #  - paradigm: series of possible forms for a lexeme
                                  #Word

TYPES ==>                         #Combining:
                                  #  - e.g. diacritics or partial ideogram
                                  #  - precomposed|composite character:
                                  #     - character containing combining characters
                                  #     - e.g. é (U-00E9) contains both e (U-0065) and  ́ (U-0301)
                                  #     - Unicode equivalent to its non-precomposed form
                                  #Non-printing / control character:
                                  #  - C0 control characters: U-0000-U-001F, including \0, \a, \b, \t, \n, \v, \f, \r, \e, space, DEL
                                  #  - C1 control characters: U-0080-U-009F
                                  #  - RTL chars: U-061C, U-200E-U-200F, U-202A-U-202E
                                  #  - line|paragraph separators U-2028-U-2029 are not control characters

STRING ==>                        #Array of characters
                                  #Length can be:
                                  #  - set compile-time ("fixed-length") or runtime ("variable-length")
                                  #  - indicated by:
                                  #     - a leading number ("Pascal string" / "P-string" / "length-prefixed")
                                  #     - a sentinel value (often \0) ("C-string" / "null-terminated string")
                                  #        - pros:
                                  #           - unlimited length
                                  #           - takes less space
                                  #        - cons:
                                  #           - slower length access
                                  #           - cannot contain termination character
                                  #              - this leads to distinguishing "binary" strings vs "non-binary" strings