What is our API surface?

[nciric]

We started discussing use cases and potential lexicon format in #1 . Let's move details of API design to a separate issue (this one).

From my end I see the following use cases:

1. Inflecting a single word in a message format, from base form with provided grammatical information, e.g. icu.inflect("sr-Latn", "Beograd", options { "vocative", "singular" }) -> "Beograde" . Necessary grammatical information for "Beograd", like gender, inanimate etc, would be pulled from a lexicon.
2. For a given word, find its lemma and grammatical info.
3. For a word not in a lexicon, try to "guess" its inflected form, based on rules and/or similarity to other words in the dictionary.
4. Optional - try to align multiple related words, e.g. inflect adjectives and corresponding noun to form grammatically sound whole - big red apple. In case of English reorder the adjectives?

[grhoten]

Let's use pull request #35 as a starting point. Issue #36 does cover an issue around the Core Foundation dependency in the API.

I say that we close this issue once we have an initial release.

[grhoten]

As per my previous comment, the initial release for the tech preview has been created. The API is documented here: https://unicode-org.github.io/inflection/