On 24.06.2013 18:10, Alexander Belopolsky wrote:
> 
> Alexander Belopolsky added the comment:
> 
>> The .aliases() function would have to return a list, not a single
>> name, so a parameter would cause the return type to change, which
>> is not a good idea.
> 
> You misunderstood my proposal.  .name() will still return a single name, but the type parameter will control which name to return:
> 
> name(ch[, type=(None|'correction'|'control'|'alternate'|'figment'|'abbreviation')])
> 
> None - default, same as current behavior.
> 
> correction - indicates that the returned name is a corrected form for the original name (which remains valid) for the same code point.
> 
> control - return a new name added for a control character.
> 
> alternate - return an alternate name for a character
> 
> figment - return a name for a character that has been documented but was never in any actual standard.
> 
> abbreviation - return a common abbreviation for a character

How can you be sure that each of those alias types occurs only
once ?

The NameAliases.txt doesn't say anything about this, AFAIK:

http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/NameAliases.txt

Also, what would name() return in case to alias of a particular
type is defined ?

I think it would be easier and more future proof to have a function
aliases(code) -> [(type, alias),...] which simply returns all
defined aliases. Applications could then add helpers for
select the type they would like to use.

It may make sense to also add the name(code) value as
e.g. ('standard', name(code)) to that list.

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