Re: arabic number in bidi algorithm

From: John Cowan (cowan@ccil.org)
Date: Thu Oct 28 1999 - 16:36:11 EDT


"Reynolds, Gregg" wrote:

> Arabic numeric forms whose meaning is numeric are written left-to-right.

Question: I have never known how to construe this. I assume it means
that the most significant digit appears on the left and the least significant
digit appears on the right, just as with European numbers.

However:

1) In the Unicode character stream, which digit appears first, the most
significant or the least significant?

2) When rendering character-by-character (such as when writing by hand),
which digit is rendered first, the most significant or the least significant?

In case my questions are not clear, I will say that for European digits
the answer is "the most significant digit" to both questions: we
represent "500" in a data stream as "5" followed by "0" followed by "0",
and we render it the same way.

-- 

John Cowan http://www.reutershealth.com jcowan@reutershealth.com Schlingt dreifach einen Kreis vom dies / Schliess eurer Aug vor heiliger Schau Den er genoss vom Honig-Tau / Und trank die Milch vom Paradies. -- Coleridge (tr. Politzer)



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