The greek library

Version 9.0.0

In the twenty-first century, it’s still not possible to use internet standards to represent ancient Greek digitally. The library documented here offers a way to work with semantically explicit representations of the numerous alphabetic writing systems used in the archaic and classical Greek world.

Classes extending the GreekString trait represent a String in two formats:

1. Unicode code points in form NFC
2. a primarily or exclusively ASCII representation

Other abstractions supported in this library include the LGSTrait for Greek strings in some variation on the conventional orthography of printed literary Greek, the MidOrthography trait for classified tokenization of strings, and the CiteValidator trait for evaluating compliance of strings wtih the definition of an MidOrthography. By mixing these traits, we can minimize the effort needed to create a derivative classes tailored to corpora in specific orthographies.

Goals

Main design goals:

• Greek strings may be constructed from either a Unicode or ASCII representation: the second representation is automatically generated from the one submitted
• only explicitly enumerated code points are accepted as valid
• equality of two Greek strings does not depend on which format was used to construct the Greek string
• comparison of two Greek strings follows the ordering of the Greek alphabet
• the library is cross compiled to run either on the JVM or a javascript engine