Why would the strings match? Aren't they completely different? (What language are we talking about, anyway?)
In some theoretical sense, yes. In terms of solving users' problems and providing business value, I need to make it possible for users to find the entry for "Łódź" without typing accents.
> (What language are we talking about, anyway?)
We're talking about Scala; it runs on the JVM and so java.lang.String is the string type.
Human language? English speakers talking about cities in a variety of countries (which should be correctly named, but searchable by english speakers).
This thread is talking about two completely different types of Equals; we shouldn't be using the same word for them and certainly not the same function name in code:
- SomeString1.Equals(SomeString2) -> are all the bytes in array 1 equal to the bytes in array 2?
- HumanSimilarity(t1, t2) - given text s1 and text s2, give me a number that tells me how similar a person would perceive these strings to be. You could even go further:
SimilarityForReaderInLocale(locale, t1, locale1, t2, locale2) - for a human reader in locale, given text t1 written by a human in locale1 and text t2 written by a human in locale2, how similar would the reader perceive these two pieces of text?
When we talk about 'least surprise' in manipulations, what I think we really mean is that text manipulation should be defined by a locale; no actually, a superset of a locale. That superset being your typical human reader in that locale.