"Eric Niebler" <eric@boost-consulting.com> wrote in message
No. "Normalization" doesn't always mean canonical decomposition. There are several canonical forms, some of which *require* the use of composite characters. In fact, the XML standard requires such a canonical form. A Unicode library cannot hide the issue of canonicalization from the user, because users will care which canonical form is being used.
When I say "hidden", I do not neccesarily mean "unaccessible". I can think of many ways to provide a policy or something that would determine which normalization form would be used on a call to the == operator. My point was that we should not require the common user to know what a normalization form is, and to aid that provide a default normalization policy that maps the closest to "common sense". ('ö' should "equal" 'oš' for example.)