> In the case of Wordle, you know the exact set of letters you’re going to be using
This holds for the generator side too. In fact, you have a fixed word list, and the fixed alphabet tells you what a "letter" is, and thus how to compute length. Because this concerns natural language, this will coincide with grapheme clusters, and with English Wordle, that will in turn correspond to byte length because it won't give you words with é (I think). In different languages the grapheme clusters might be larger than 1 byte (e.g. [1], where they're codepoints).
In German you have the same, only within one language. ß can be written as ss if it isn't available in a font, and only in 2017 they added a capital version. So depending the font and the unicode version the number of letters can differ.
"Traditionally, ⟨ß⟩ did not have a capital form, and was capitalized as ⟨SS⟩. Some type designers introduced capitalized variants. In 2017, the Council for German Orthography officially adopted a capital form ⟨ẞ⟩ as an acceptable variant, ending a long debate."
I don't see why it should. I also believe parent is wrong as there are unambiguous rules about when to use ß or ss.
Never thought of it but maybe there are rules that allow to visually present the code point for ß as ss? At least (from experience as a user) there seem to be a singular "ss" codepoint.
>also believe parent is wrong as there are unambiguous rules about when to use ß or ss.
I never said it was ambiguous, I said it depends on the unicode version and the font you are using. How is that wrong? (Seems like the capital of ß is still SS in the latest unicode but since ẞ is the preferred capital version now this should change in the future)
That's not really any different than the distinction (or lack thereof) between "ae" and "æ". For that matter, in Russian there is a letter "ы" which is historically a digraph consisting of two separately letters "ъ" and "i" that just happens to be treated as a single letter for so long that few people would even recognize it as a digraph. This kind of stuff is all language-specific, which is why for Worlde etc you always need to be aware of the context, and this context will then unambiguously decide what constitutes a single letter.